California Shrinks School Library Space

Education reformers nationwide have long advocated reducing class sizes, and two years ago, California's state legislature voted to reduce them, from 32 students in some cases to 20 today. But while there are smaller classes, there are also more of them. "With class-size reduction," says Bonnie O'Brien Nissman, supervisor of library and textbook services for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), "every inch of the school is taken up." This means that libraries are often moved into the halls, or into rooms too small to allow them to shelve all of their books.

LAUSD has witnessed major growth in the number of students over the past few years. The district's current K–12 student population is 727,000, compared to 697,000 last year. At the same time, the California legislature has voted to give the state's school libraries $28 per child to pay for new materials. "But what's not included with this money," says Nissman, "is shelving and places to house the books." Nor is there enough money to staff elementary schools with certified library media teachers. The result is often a crowded school without a librarian to advocate on its library's behalf.

At Simi Elementary School in the Simi Valley, for example, the school library, which is run by a noncertified technician, is housed in a hallway. With databases and CD-ROM encyclopedias in the individual classrooms, the only terminal in the hallway library is the one used to check the online catalog. Simi Elementary's principal, Aldo Calcagno, says that moving the library into a better space "is a high priority," but for the foreseeable future, there is nowhere else to put it.

For other school libraries, the problem isn't space, but lack of staff. Karen Gibler, one of the two librarians at Roosevelt High School in central Los Angeles, says, "My school has around 5,000 students, many of whom aren't reading at grade level and need lots of encouragement. But we have no funding for library clerks. I personally circulate 200 to 400 books a day. How do I get the materials processed and out on the shelves?"

Jo Ellen Misakian, director of the library media credential program at Fresno Pacific University, says that the next step in improving California's school libraries is to fund certified library media teachers in all its schools. Right now, says Misakian, "We don't have a state that values putting library media teachers in its elementary schools." She and other members of the California School Library Association are working on a bill for the current legislative session that would fund elementary library media teachers for a group of the state's lowest-performing schools and document their effect on student achievement.