Oklahoma Lawmakers Consider Bill ThatAllows Schools toFire Librarians
RSSBy Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 04/07/2010
Oklahoma is on track to permit its schools to fire librarians if the state legislature passes a bill in the next few weeks.
Drafted by State Senator Jim Halligan, Oklahoma House Bill 3029 allows school districts to effectively shutter all school libraries through the 2012 school year—an override of state standards meant to ease budget concerns across the state.
Calls to Senator Halligan’s office were not returned.
Approved by the State’s House of Representatives on March 2, the bill worked its way into a Senate appropriations committee, which passed the bill sending it on to the full Senate on March 24, according to a spokesperson for the Oklahoma State Senate.
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Ellen Duecker, Director of Instructional Media & Library Services for Tulsa Public Schools, and a member of the Oklahoma Library Association. |
Oklahoma is hardly the first state to see strained financial coffers affect school libraries and classrooms. From the Riverside County School District in California, to the Tippecanoe School Corporation in Indiana, school districts have been making decisions to lay-off media specialists, among other staff, and even close school libraries in an effort to stem hemorrhages in their budgets.
However, school librarians across Oklahoma hope that their legislature will search for other means to help schools stretch their strained budgets for the coming school years.
“We know that there’s strong support for the measure because of budgets, and the way it’s presented is it gives more local control to school districts,” says Ellen Duecker, Director of Instructional Media & Library Services for Tulsa Public Schools, and a member of the Oklahoma Library Association, which opposes the bill. “In that environment we look like we’re against local control, but what we’re really saying, is we need to protect standards, classrooms, and the entire student body.”
In the meantime, HB 3029 sits in the Oklahoma State Senate, where it needs to be approved by April 22, or dies, says a spokesperson for the State Senate. If passed, it works its way to Governor Brad Henry, who, many believe, will sign the bill into law.
“We could live without [library] materials if we had to for two years,” says Decker, who notes that Tulsa’s school district actually passed a $19 million six-year bond measure to support school libraries in March and is in better shape than other school districts in the state. “But without a library media specialist, we lose a professional teacher guiding our students.”
