Now This…

We’ve been warned social security will be gone by 2025. We’ve been threatened with the elimination of Saturday mail delivery. But now this...they’ve fired the librarians from the public elementary school libraries in Los Angeles. How can you have a public school with no librarian? Libraries are a fundamental need in our schools and communities and yet some collective of Einsteins at LAUSD thought that getting rid of the librarians/library aides, which would then require the schools to close the libraries if they were not adequately staffed, was a good money saving idea. Really? Why don’t we just eliminate the cafeterias too and stop feeding those kids? We have a childhood obesity problem in this country anyway, right? That would save some money for the school district, too.

It makes absolutely no sense that an educational system that is designed to enrich its students and support learning on every level would think that a library was not an essential tool in that learning process. So, now that our school has no library aide, the parents must sign up for shifts in order to keep the library open until another plan can be developed. In order to save the library, parents, grandparents, even the principal’s cousin, many of whom have neither the time nor energy to add yet another thing to their already chaotic lives, have volunteered to train and staff a public school library because the district won’t do it. At first, the district refused to even let us use the district wide system unless a union aide was present. They relented, and now the parent staffed library will be open for now. All I can say is, somewhere, Ben Franklin is rolling over in his grave.