Los Angeles laying off 85 librarians. Tells them they are not teachers.

[madfloridian]

Where I taught our librarian/media specialists had to have masters degrees. They had to be qualified to teach as well. So I gather this effectively means they are out of a job, instead of being allowed to use their experience to move into a classroom setting.

That's basically what the hearings were about recently, the ones in which librarians were interrogated by school lawyers with police standing by.

NPR has an article about the final decision.

L.A. School District Tells Librarians: You're Not Teachers


Reed Saxon/AP Teachers and librarians demonstrate against thousands of proposed job cuts in the Los Angeles Unified School District Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Unified School District plans to lay off thousands of employees, as it faces a budget shortfall of more than $640 million. The cuts include 85 school librarians — who have been told that they no longer count as teachers. The change in classification would make it easier for the school district to cut the jobs.

The librarians have been facing questions from the district's lawyers, as an administrative law judge seeks to determine if they should be considered as teachers.

See how easy that was? Just change their classification after they have spent years doing their job. Nothing to it. Just let the lawyers snap their fingers.

At KQED's California Report, Krissy Clark reports:

In the basement of a building in downtown L.A., there is a makeshift hearing room where school librarians have been quietly defending their jobs over the last few weeks.

One by one, librarians who got layoff notices this spring sat before a judge, while a school district attorney peppered them with questions about their abilities as teachers. "Do you know how to take attendance?" he'd ask. "How many weeks are in a school year?"

Librarian Allison Walker was shaking after she came off the stand.

"Basically, what he just tried to present was that I don't qualify as a teacher because I've been in the library," she said.

Walker went on to say that she taught every day — and that her classroom was different, containing 12,000 books.

From the comments at the I found the requirements to be a librarian there.

In order to become school librarians, a 30 unit teaching credential is required in addition to a 30 unit library credential. We have two credentials; classroom teachers have one, and we're not considered teachers?
Meredith Brace
Library Teacher, Santa Barbara

Another of the librarians who was questioned by district lawyers talked about it in her blog. I posted about it the other day. That librarian was in effect ridiculed at this forum for writing her blog and expecting it not to be printed off and used against her.

Few got the point or even cared. Why are librarians being subjected to all this in the first place? When did they become the enemy and why? I never knew a librarian who wasn't more qualified than I was to teach.

L.A. school lawyers printed off 90 pages of librarian's blog. Used it against her at hearing.

“I can observe on my right hand side the attorneys for United Teachers Los Angeles, who are the men that will make my case when the time comes. Their table is laden with binders nearly eight inches thick that are filled with the thousands of documents we teachers have entered into evidence. These are teaching credentials, lesson plans, and letters of recommendation, among other things.... On my left is the school district’s table of attorneys. They have a plastic cart filled with evidence binders and their own files of information collected on each of us in what I can only assume was a rather hurried manner....My employer has become my enemy.

..."Today I am furloughed. Tomorrow I go back to the hearings to plead my case. I do not want to. The next day I go back to school to prepare the library to be closed forever, or to be run a few hours a week by a reluctant clerk, or to be ransacked. The questions continue to pile up, but no answers are forthcoming. Stand by for further developments. Hurry up and wait.

At the bottom of all of this is a political reality that I find so daunting, so dark, that to enter into a discussion of it strikes fear in my heart and nausea in my belly. I believe that this is part of a larger movement in our city (and state, and finally, nation) towards a for-profit education model that takes pressure off of elected officials and puts money in the pockets of clever financiers.

Yes, it is part of a very powerful movement to privatize public education, and the reformers are ruthless enough to make teachers and librarians their targets.

They feel no shame about doing it. There is no need for them to worry, as no one is really making an effort to even slow them down.

It's easy to change public education into privately run schools that make profit for someone....especially when a nation no longer values those who are educated.