Are school librarians an ‘endangered species’? (Bonanno)

Well, I hadn’t thought about many of the points raised by Karen for quite some time.

The Five Finger Advocacy model has been doing the rounds for a while now. Turns out I attended a Karen Bonanno session (not the one in the Module notes) in 2011 in which she discussed the FFA, and I recall it resonating with me at the time. Alas, it didn’t last.

To the question of endangerment of the role of teacher-librarians in school:

Quite clearly, the answer is yes. It is a rare government school in Victoria that has a trained teacher-librarian on staff. Whilst many schools maintain a library collection, fewer maintain a library service and many of those with a library service are managed by a library technician or librarian, or staff with no library qualifications. SLASA (School Library Association of South Australia) recently commissioned a census of all South Australian schools, administered by ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research) under the leadership of Dr. Katherine Dix. Entitled ‘School libraries in South Australia’ (2020), the scope of the project was to “undertake a census of school libraries and their staffing across all sectors (Government, Catholic and Independent) in South Australia” (Dix, K. 2020, p. 3). Previous surveys had been undertaken by various bodies, but were often directed to the library manager “on the assumption that every school has one” (Dix, K. 2020, p. 3). This resulted in a response bias: that is, only schools that supported the employment of a teacher-librarian, who had time to respond, were counted in previously collected data. Schools without a teacher-librarian were often non-responders, skewing the results. The ACER census recognised this limitation and chose the census model to collect responses from every SA school, directing and designing questions for school administrators (because every school has these!). (Dix, K. 2020, p. 3)

The ACER research clearly supports the premise that teacher-librarians are an endangered ‘species’.

• 94% of schools have someone to manage the library. In only 23% of schools is that role occupied by a qualified TL.
• Primary and K-12 schools, with an onsite library, are more likely to  have a staffed library – note that ‘staffed’ does not mean “staffed by a TL”. Just over half (51%) of staff in SA school libraries do not have library qualification of any sort.
• Budget allocation is also a good indicator of whether a school will employ qualified library staff – $2500 or more is the figure at which school are more likely to employ library staff. Note that it is only “more likely”, not a given.
• Small remote schools are unlikely to have qualified library staff, as are ‘virtual’ library services in secondary schools, and special schools miss out too. (Dix, K. 2020, p.4)

The ACER report acknowledges that there is a ‘lack of accurate information and systematic monitoring of libraries’ (Dix, K. 2020, p. 12) whilst noting that ‘[t]hat there is an undertone that things will get worse if budgets and floor space diminish, if fewer school libraries are managed by qualified staff, if the culture of support declines, and if the rhetoric of library-less schools is normalised’. (Dix, K. 2020, p.10)

Whilst the numbers of teachers undertaking the M.Ed.(TeachLib) is encouraging, it is clear from the ‘School libraries in South Australia’ report that the number of qualified staff alone will not maintain or increase the presence of library staff in schools.

Is there are sure-fire solution to prevent teacher-librarians from becoming extinct? It doesn’t appear so.

Dix, K., Felgate, R., Ahmed, S., Carslake, T., & Sniedze-Gregory, S. (2020). School libraries in South Australia 2019 Census. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-583-6