Letter: Library Coordinators Oppose Specialist Elimination

To the editor,

Last week, the

This is one unfortunate result of a plan to create common planning time for teachers advocated by the elementary principals and presented to the School Committee on June 12. Common planning time is, by all accounts, a much-needed change that will allow greater collaboration among grade-level teachers, in addition to other benefits. To gain this valuable common planning time, a fourth specialist for all K-5 students in the district will be added to the existing art, music, and gym specials that all elementary students already receive each week. Because the new common core curriculum mandates some health instruction, the principals recommended health as the fourth special, one that requires hiring two new full-time and one .6 position.

To help fund the new health specialist positions, the library media specialist position was eliminated. Our ELMS for the past three years, Ellen D’Ambruoso, is a dedicated library professional who was asked to take on the job of five people. Most districts with operating elementary school libraries hire an ELMS for each school, rather than one for five schools, as was the case in Melrose. While Ellen was used primarily to teach library and research skills to 1st and 3rd graders, some schools were better at leveraging Ellen’s skills and expertise to teach, for example, Internet safety and research skills to other grades, and to assist in the classroom with research projects. She also analyzed all five elementary collections, made recommendations to the volunteer library coordinators on purchasing books that align with the common core curriculum, and combed through our collections to ensure that non-fiction is current.

Without entering into the debate around prioritizing health over research and information literacy skills, the elimination of this position indicates a lack of awareness on the part of administrators regarding the many ways that an elementary library media specialist could benefit each school. These include helping to boost MCAS scores—8 out of 10 of the top performing Massachusetts school districts have a dedicated ELMS—to say nothing of helping to inculcate a love of reading and learning. Also, in a district that constantly strives to provide the best technology for its classrooms, dedicated instruction for students on utilizing these constantly changing tools to function in the 21st century is lacking at the elementary level.

Since the single library staff resource has been removed from the elementary schools, these libraries are now 100% volunteer-run (in addition to being 100% volunteer funded: the Melrose School District provides no money for library books and other resources. Each school’s collections are paid for through PTO fundraisers or fundraising by library volunteers.).

In the absence of an ELMS, our elementary school libraries will suffer as a result of:

• no professional staff to maintain the library collections;
• no staff member dedicated to assisting volunteer library coordinators with purchasing materials that align with the common core curriculum; 
• no professional guidance in having our libraries stay current in an era when our students should be learning how to use technology resources and do research online; 
• no dedicated professional guidance for volunteers and teachers in using Destiny, the online system for inventory, circulation, collection analysis, and more that the district recently invested in extending to every school in Melrose; 
• lack of assistance for teachers to fully utilize collections for student research.

It will be impossible for each principal to ensure that teachers across the board cover and incorporate information literacy, research, and other library skills into their existing lessons and teaching time in an effective, consistent way, as we were told would happen. The elementary library media specialist is a desperately needed position to ensure that our elementary libraries remain open, current, and consistent across the district.

Incoming Superintendent Cyndy Taymore has proposed the formation of a School Library Advisory Board to help address this now gaping hole in our children’s elementary education. While such a group can be valuable in the long run, we still lack library leadership this year, and this will create vast inequities among schools. As a result of the decision to cut the ELMS position, some library volunteers are considering not volunteering next year, which would result in library closings. Some of us plan to work even harder than we have in the past to give our children more opportunities to explore the library and benefit from its resources. Some of us are not sure what we will do. The only certainty is that the library experience will differ greatly at each school as a result of the district abandoning any central library leadership and expertise.

As library volunteers, we have witnessed the joy of students discovering a new book or diving into an old favorite. For some children in our district, this may be the only time they will visit a library to select a book of their choice. There is no doubt that, for the 200+ library volunteers in Melrose, it is a very rewarding experience. As a group, we have invested thousands of hours of our time. Our PTOs and we ourselves have invested thousands of dollars in building these collections. It is crucial to keep our elementary school libraries open. At a bare minimum, we need the district’s support in the form of professional staff. Without knowledgeable staff, we are taking a step backwards for our children, for their ability to acquire 21st century skills, and, ultimately, for the impact it will have on their lifelong love of learning.

Best regards,
Christina Gagliano
Roosevelt Library Coordinator

Melinda Stockwell
Horace Mann Library Coordinator