MO Librarians Fight Back

Library media specialists in the Kansas City (MO) school district saved their jobs by taking matters into their own hands. Faced with losing more than one-third of the district's 69 media specialists, school librarians spent weeks lobbying board members and talking to the media. It worked: the board voted July 9 to reinstate the positions.

The city's board of education, suffering from a $16.1 million budget deficit, decided to eliminate 24 librarians in June, a move that would have left elementary schools with itinerant librarians for as little as one day a week. But once the news got out, district librarians acted quickly. Gloria Bandstra, a media specialist at Chick Elementary School, organized an emergency meeting of about 50 school librarians. Jane Cudahy, a librarian at Scarritt Elementary School, contacted board members and newspapers, as well as radio and TV stations.

The real clincher came when librarians made the case that axing some full-time media specialists would mean the district would fail to gain full accreditation status when it was reevaluated in January 2004 under the Missouri School Improvement Plan. Gaining the distinction would elevate the school district from its current provisional accreditation status.

The $21.5 million needed to keep the librarian positions for the 2003–2004 school year was drawn from a 2002 $66 million rainy-day fund.