Monday, March 15, 2010

Awful News: LAUSD to Cut All School Librarians

A Google Alert email for "information literacy" included a link to a School Library Journal article by Rocco Staino, "LA Unified School District to Eliminate All Certified Librarians." While there is faint hope that this action will be rescinded, we cannot count on it. This is a sad day for Los Angeles and for the almost 618,000 students in the District, who will no longer have librarians to help them become information literate, prepared for higher education research and learning, and able to participate as informed citizens in a democratic society, for a lifetime.
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownMarch 17, 2010 at 11:48 AM

    Wow - this is indeed a sad event. It is bad enough that LAUSD schools only have librarians at the middle and high school levels, but to remove them at this critical moment in our times when a person's ability to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information is more critical than ever, is catastrophic! I hope that this is rescinded.

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  2. AnonymousMay 1, 2010 at 4:17 PM

    I visit Lausd school libraries EVERY day (it's my job). I see the educational devastation that will ensue, as most kids in the LA area are in dual wage-earner households OR single parent households and parents do NOT have time to take their students to the public library. Without school libraries, kids will not READ, period. Without school library staff--certificated or not--the vast library collections will grow legs and walk off into oblivion like they always do when no one is running the library. Without school libraries to support the teachers, students and the curriculum, school becomes a rote, bare-basics-level experience, with no magic of libraries to awe the students and no encouragement for them to have the one vital ingredient in their education--literacy. Without literacy, we become a second-world population in a supposed first-world country will vast cadres of highly educated and literate children from India and Asia will eclipse our children and take the best jobs in our global economy. I suppose we can just do a bare-bones education of our kids--no literacy included--and then pop them all into the ever-growing McDonald's sites to flip burgers and work the drive-thru windows. How very sad...

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