Last night, the Canadian radio broadcast, "As It Happens," featured a remarkable story about what's going on in Los Angeles public schools, as officials grapple with a budget crisis. Librarians -- more specifically, teacher-librarians, are being escorted to the basement of an administration building, where they are made to sit on lawn chairs while being interrogated by school district lawyers who are seeking to prove that the librarians don't actually qualify as teachers. From the
"As It Happens" Web site:
Teacher-Librarians in Los Angeles are under threat.
The Los Angeles Unified School District wants to lay off eighty-five middle- and high-school teacher librarians to reduce costs. As a result, school librarians across L.A. are being interrogated by lawyers working for the School District to see if their qualifications are up to scratch.
Laura Graff, a teacher librarian at LA's Sun Valley High School, has been on the receiving end of one of these questionings. We reached her in Los Angeles, California.
That description hardly does justice to the process that Graff recounts, which she characterized as very adversarial. Graff said that her job requires both a teaching certificate and a library science degree, and suggested that administrators themselves have their eyes on the teacher-librarian jobs, saying they want to replace libraries with some sort of high-tech schemes.
Hmmm...The librarians in the public school systems that nurtured me taught me pretty much how to do the job I do now. They taught me how to research, how to cross-reference sources, and guided me to books that encouraged me to dream. We really wouldn't want that for the children of L.A., now, would we?
Well worth a listen;
archived on the show's Web site in Part 2 of the program.
By Adele M. Stan | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at May 26, 2011, 4:15 pm
5 comments:
The Los Angeles Unified School District wants to lay off eighty-five middle- and high-school teacher librarians to reduce costs.
Have some mercy, M.B. Don't you know there's a lot of rich Californians suffering because they can't have even more tax cuts?
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This is precisely why, when photographing anything other than a tree, I take advantage of the massive capacity of the digital camera and simply shoot hundreds of photos entirely at random. The key here is to take myself entirely out of the equation, for I am a gawdawful photog. But when I get home and scroll through the shotz on the big monitor, I always find some gems I never would have gotten if I was actually involved in the process...
20th Century Editor:
We know a good whatever doesn't blame his tools, but we do have an eye for composition. Sadly, the camera is just smart enough to be trouble.
Good advice 'though; we certainly haven't adjusted to the digital age, & are still thinking 36-exposure roll.
This Californian expects to be suffering from tax cuts soon too.
I don't much like the new guy, but As It Happens has a lot of really fine interviews. Somewhere I also read a blog post from a recent firee...awfully depressing.
Media Weasel Ed.
One of the local NPR stations used to (& may still) run As It Happens, but we haven't heard it for a while.
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