Schools Eliminating Librarians as Budgets Shrink – NYTimes.com

Too bad the skilled school librarian has never been needed more than in recent years. People do not understand that adequate appropriate library support is critical if we want students to be more than just data miners and plagiarists. In my school library, we are spending more and more very long days because teachers and students both are demanding more support for the complex digital world in learning. In a high school of 1800 Grade 10-12 teens, 1.6 TL’s working 12 hour days isn’t even enough support.  Google skills are simply not enough. If we want 21st C learners that everyone espouses, cutting librarians in schools is just counter productive.- Al Smith

Schools Eliminating Librarians as Budgets Shrink – NYTimes.com.

Budget belt-tightening threatens to send school librarians the way of the card catalog.

“The dilemma that schools will face is whether to cut a teacher who has been working with kids all day long in a classroom or cut teachers who are working in a support capacity, like librarians,” the city’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said in an interview.

In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are also changing some officials’ view of librarians: as more classrooms are equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, Mr. Polakow-Suransky noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously might have required a library visit.

“It’s the way of the future,” he said.

Nancy Everhart, president of the American Association of School Librarians, whose membership has fallen to 8,000 from 10,000 in 2006, said that, on the contrary, the Internet age made trained librarians more important, to guide students through the basics of searching and analyzing information they find online.