Ravaged by cuts, school libraries fight to stay alive
Almost every afternoon, librarian Linda Kenton helps students from San Rafael's Bahia Vista Elementary School find the books, Web pages and other materials they need to complete their assignments.
"They come after school and use the library for homework help," Kenton said. "They use it for doing projects on our computers, and for our reading material."
There's just one problem: Kenton, who works at the Pickleweed branch of the San Rafael Public Library, isn't a school librarian. And while she's willing to go to almost any length to help the children who visit her library, Kenton isn't a credentialed teacher, and her library wasn't designed with an elementary school curriculum in mind.
The informal arrangement between Bahia Vista and the Pickleweed library could be a preview of what's to come in San Rafael and in much of Marin County, where school libraries have been ravaged by state budget cuts. Novato has one certified teacher-librarian for all 14 of its schools, while the Ross Valley School District, Sausalito Marin City School District and all of West Marin's schools have none at all.
"People say they want cuts to come away from the classroom," said Linda Bennett, a former librarian with the Kentfield School District who now works as a consultant. "What they don't understand is that a school library is a classroom. It's not a branch of the public library. It's where kids learn to use the tools for research in a research-based world."
Bennett and other library
supporters point to dozens of studies that show a strong positive correlation between staffing levels at school libraries and student performance on state tests."It is more than ironic that school districts are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on reading programs and staff development which have had limited success in boosting test scores, but are unwilling to invest in school library programs that show such direct correlations to student success," researcher Douglas Achterman wrote in a 2008 study of California school libraries.
Libraries, supporters say, don't just provide students with information. They teach them how to distinguish useful information from the flood of available resources, as well as how to organize and present that information - an