As the education year winds down with the start of summer, there are school librarians across the country who will not be returning in the fall. Whether they have been determined to be “not teachers” by an administrative court, being cut from the budget, or still working to save school libraries, these past two weeks have been wicked evil to this end of the profession. On top of that, the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program was eliminated from the Department of Education. (I presume the innovation that the President spoke about at the State of the Union address will be for student to find new ways to develop research skills.)
What the fuck is going on here?
While I’m happy that ALA has put an open letter out there for the LA school librarians, it still makes me wonder: how’d things get to this point?
This week’s open thread suggested topic: school librarians. How to help them and how to save them. Why? Because they are part of the library ecosystem.
If you’re a school librarian, share what other librarians should know but maybe don’t and what the rest of us can do to help.
If you’re not a school librarian, share what you think can be done to increase awareness and communication with our school librarian peers. What do you want to know and be kept up to date about?
While this is the suggested topic, this is an open thread. Share what’s on your mind. And anonymous comments are still welcome.
(h/t: Cathy Jo Nelson, since I stole liberated a number of links from her Facebook page.)
Agnostic, Maybe 
Well, this budget “mix up” would help a lot: The Onion’s “Update” — http://youtu.be/AvJA87tgm90
I am a Teacher Librarian not far from LAUSD. Next year I will be the TL for 6 High Schools in Orange County (the OC). What I need people to know is: I TEACH. I teach information literacy, I teach comprehension skills, I teach digital citizenship, I teach citation, I teach note-taking, I teach “reading appreciation,” I teach respect, I teach access, evaluation and use of information. I teach ALL 2600 students at one school. I teach all 14,000 across the district (now). I keep up a website and teach students to use it to optimize their learning. I teach databases and I teach them to love and appreciate their public libraries.
I hope Public libraries (and public higher education academic libraries) will be proactive and pick up the slack.