Despite two months of protest and negotiations from parents and teacher-librarians, the board of the Spokane (Wash.) Public Schools unanimously approved August 8 the reduction to part-time status of librarians serving 10 elementary schools as part of the district’s 2007–08 budget. Culminating several years of cutting other elementary-school librarians’ hours, the action leaves the second-largest school district in Washington without a single full-time K–8 teacher-librarian, Washington Library Media Association spokesperson Jennifer Maydole told American Libraries.
According to school board members, the cost savings of $300,000 went toward closing the district’s $10.8-million shortfall in its $293-million operating budget. Also slashed were an unspecified number of custodial and central-office workers, funding for some extracurricular activities for K–8 students, and the closing of the Pratt Elementary School.
“We don’t have much of a choice at all,” asserted school board member Rocky Treppiedi in the August 9 Spokane Spokesman Review about the media-center cuts. He added, “It was a choice professionals also supported.”
Maydole vehemently disagreed, telling AL that the board started out in September 2006 with a “laundry list of items to cut,” and chose to retain half of them. Noting how one school board member defended the teacher-librarian cutback because “not even school building principals objected,” Maydole suggested that the budget crisis was really about ensuring that the district could begin FY2008 with a $14.7-million beginning fund balance instead of dipping into savings. “The impact to students is huge compared to the fiscal impact on a $293-million budget, which is nothing,” she declared.
As a result of futilely “doing due diligence” to change the minds of Spokane school officials since January, Maydole revealed that WLMA is forming a task force to proactively scrutinize the school-library bottom line in every preliminary FY2009 school-district budget in the state beginning in September. The association is also backing a $21-million state-budget request to fully fund school library media programs in every K–12 school. The sum comes from Gov. Chris Gregoire’s 2006 “Washington Learns” report on stabilizing education funding, which says that it would take $20 per K–8 student and $25 per high-schooler to provide an acceptable level of school-library resources for Washington’s school-age children.
Posted on August 10, 2007.