It's Go Time

Now is the time to speak up for school librarians

The ease with which the Chicago Public Schools ignores the almost total lack of librarians in its urban public school system, during this period in history, is astounding. We currently face a free speech and information literacy crisis of the highest magnitude in this country. We are awash in First Amendment 5-alarm fires. At every turn, we see social media companies allowing hate speech and calling it free speech. We are grappling with AI integration, which is changing the very nature of the information we are being served. We need to pay the utmost attention to discern fiction from facts. One could argue that the most important subject that should be attended to in schools at this moment, in addition to teaching reading, is the teaching of information literacy.

Image: Fenger High School Library Letter, courtesy of 1957 Fenger Graduate

Against this backdrop, CEO Martinez, CEdO Chkoumbova, and the CPS administration have been absolutely silent regarding the extreme loss of librarians in the Chicago Public Schools. Despite outcry from many Chicagoans, the administrators certainly haven’t been pressed by local education reporters to discuss the decline.

CTU has put forth a proposal that would return librarians to every school, letting the district make another step towards the equity it professes to value. CTU proposes to centrally fund librarian positions, as the district does for principals, clerks, counselors, social workers, and nurses. This would fix the funding problem that forced principals to sacrifice librarians to properly staff classrooms under the locally focused student-based budgeting process. But after more than 6 months of contract negotiations, CPS has made no commitment or even a move toward increasing the librarian positions in the district.

Advocating for school librarians could be considered an easy task because there is literally NO downside to having a school librarian. In addition, there are decades of data and scholarly writing that prove the benefits of having a school librarian- both to learning and to the bottom line. (See CTU Librarians Linktree for a start).

However, if you speak to the librarians who work in CPS, they will tell you that they have advocated and worked for years, only to be ignored.

I won’t waste my time here recounting the weak and insulting rationalizations that continue to be tossed out when librarian staffing is brought up in different forums, but let me make clear that they are, in a word, garbage.

Maybe that is why the CEO and CEdO have simply defaulted to ignoring the situation because there is no good reason for 85% of CPS schools to be absent a librarian. They can’t justify this situation, so like a toddler shutting their eyes, they simply refuse to acknowledge the problem.

Libraries have suffered somewhat in the past by being victims of their own success. They are almost universally loved, and universally taken for granted.

Community members need to understand that this precious resource is not guaranteed, and we live in a time when we must fight to keep them.

So to all Chicagoans, please understand that if you think schools should have libraries, you must say so. There are many ways, big and small, to advocate for school libraries.

Ask if your neighborhood school has a library, and call or write the principal to advocate for a librarian position. Call, write to, or speak at the LSC meeting to advocate for a librarian position. Talk to your neighbors, to the people you see at the fieldhouse, to your young neighbors who may not even have kids. Tell them that CPS schools don’t have librarians and that the CTU is fighting to return them to every school!

Call or email CPS leadership and tell them we need school librarians.

CEO Pedro Martinez 773-553-1500 ceo-martinez@cps.edu

CEdO Bogdana Chkoumbova 773-553-1500 cedo-chkoumbova@cps.edu

Call, email, or make an appointment to see your school board representative and tell them every school should have a librarian, and ask what they are going to do about it. Encourage your friends and neighbors to do the same.

No act is too small, it’s just important that we speak up. The CTU librarians have been fighting for years, and we sure could use your help. Let this be the hour when Chicago comes together to return a librarian to every school and every student. LFG.