It's SCARY without a LIBRARY
As it finally begins to cool off and really feel like Spooky Season here in Chicago, I continue to be horrified by the dwindling number of school librarians in the Chicago Public Schools. To recap, the number of school librarians has been steadily declining, going from a high of over 500 twelve years ago, to the current low of 77.
That’s right. For a district of over 500 schools, with 320,000 students, there are 77 librarians. 12 high school librarians total. To contrast this, a high school in an affluent northern suburb has 12 people in its library department. 12 library workers for one school, versus 12 librarians for a whole district.
This data, by itself, is SCARY.
But why, exactly, is it so SCARY to not have a school librarian? There are a lot of reasons: It is SCARY that students can’t choose books that reflect themselves and their experiences. It is SCARY that students can’t read other peoples’ stories to help them develop empathy. It is SCARY that students aren’t learning information literacy skills in this age of digital disinformation.
But to me, one of the Big Bads of the library SCARIES are the people who DISGUISE themselves as Lovers of literacy but underneath are the same ones who cut 85% of our school librarians.
Defunding libraries and librarians is a form of censorship, restricting access to a diverse, well maintained collection staffed by an information literacy specialist - a librarian.
The library is a unique 3rd space within a school that supports literacy, social emotional health, and critical thinking. Every student deserves to have access to such a space.
The guardians of that third space are school librarians. School librarians who are SLAYERS of ignorance, illiteracy, misinformation, loneliness, authoritarianism and the privatization of knowledge.
There is a lot of talk in Chicago about the school district’s budget deficit, but there should be equal talk about the knowledge deficit, about the skill deficit, about the empathy deficit, about the imagination deficit that results from closing libraries. In order to support school libraries, in order to support the freedom to read, one must support funding librarian positions. If the system does not fund libraries, it creates the same outcome as that sought by the book banning extremists - closing libraries, preventing library access, and curtailing the freedom to read.
Defunding, underfunding, and cutting libraries is censorship. Neo-liberals try to rationalize cuts to libraries as necessary to balance budgets, but the result is that they are literally doing the work of extremist book banners for them.
The Chicago Teachers Union is fighting for a School Librarian in every school. This is one of our contract demands, and we have been talking about it for six months straight. As educators, we want Pedro Martinez and the Board of Education to centrally fund a school librarian for every school, just as they do for principals and counselors.
Because every student deserves a school librarian.