Iowa: Teacher-Librarians a Must

After a 10-year absence, mandate makes it back into state law

By Jennifer Pinkowski -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2006

In 1995, a long-standing requirement that each Iowa school district have a media specialist somehow was “left out” of the state’s education law.

Lawmakers called it an oversight. Librarians were dubious. “We were told it was a clerical error,” says Kristin Steingreaber, chair of the Iowa Association of School Libraries. “I find that hard to understand. And the mandate just wasn’t put back in the next year. It had to be voted on.”

But for the next 11 years, it wasn’t voted on. As the bill it was attached to languished in committee, “we lost 195 full-time librarians from Iowa schools,” says Susan Craig, president of the Iowa Library Association. “Eighty-five districts had no MLS librarians at all.”

Now, a new code requirement in the Student Achievement and Teacher Quality Program, signed into law by Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack on July 1, requires that each school district have a licensed teacher-librarian. The law that mandate is attached to raises teachers’ pay by $210 million over the next three years and increases the minimum salary by $1,000.

Iowa librarians are thrilled with the long-overdue reinstatement. “Teacher-librarians are not extras. They are a part of the staff,” says Craig. “And they make a huge difference if they work in collaboration with teachers in the classrooms.”

Another new element in the resurrected code is a language change from “media specialist” to “teacher-librarian.”

It’s not just a matter of semantics. “'Teacher-librarian’ is more descriptive of what the job is. Each librarian has a teaching license and an MLS degree,” says Craig. “Information literary skills, cooperating with teachers’ lesson plans, electronic information—these are all things teacher-librarians are skilled at, and things our students need to know for higher education, the workplace, and lifelong learning.”

According to both Craig and Steingreaber, a major force behind the bill’s passage was the wife of the man who signed it into law: Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack, who in the six years her husband has been in office (his term ends this year) has promoted the essential role librarians play in 21st-century education.

A former language-arts teacher and, more recently, a professor of English and journalism at Iowa Wesleyan College, Vilsack heads several library and reading programs, including Iowa Stories 2000 and Glass Apples for Teacher-Librarians. It was with this last program that she went on a media blitz, visiting more than 500 libraries across Iowa in the past six years. “It was initially just to give the award to a teacher-librarian, which was nice,” she says. “But then I started giving press conferences at all of them to highlight the importance of teacher-librarians. I simply used my position to call attention to the issue.”

She also registered as a nonpaid lobbyist. Following the lead of the Iowa Association of School Libraries and the Iowa Library Association, which had been urging the reinstatement for a decade, for two years she lobbied Iowan legislators to reinstate the mandate. In her arsenal were studies from 16 states showing how students’ test scores improve when children attend a school that has a media center staffed by a licensed librarian. (See the 2006 update of School Libraries Work!) She also presented surveys from Iowa colleges that assessed that the information-literacy abilities of students—essential for the 21st-century classroom and workplace—were often lacking. The need to teach those skills in K–12 was clear, she says.

“The teacher-librarian is the one person who can speak the language of our children, who were born in a digital age,” she says. “The rest of us, we’re 'digital immigrants.’ We speak with an accent. The teacher-librarian can bridge that gap, and can help teachers integrate technology into our classrooms.”

The mandate is merely a first step, says Vilsack. For instance, it doesn’t make clear how many teacher-librarians each district needs, nor how many hours the teacher-librarian spends in the library. And as always, money is an issue. “Even those school districts that were supportive of needing to improve conditions are concerned the mandate will cost them money,” says Craig. “It’s a tension between wanting to do the right thing and not having the money to do it.”

To help schools figure it all out, a task force composed of representatives from the Iowa Association of School Librarians, the State Library of Iowa, and the Iowa Department of Education is writing guidelines for creating “a quality media program,” says Steingreaber. It should be in place by January 2007.

The aim is to help schools meet both the letter and the spirit of the law. “If the goal is to have an information-literate citizen at the end of an education, it’s going to take all of the educational professionals to achieve that goal,” says Steingreaber. “We librarians are not just 'keepers of the books.’”