Northville School Board Votes to Layoff Media Specialists

In what they described as a difficult decision, Northville's school board voted Tuesday night to eliminate 3 full-time media specialist positions and one half-time position.

President Dottie Garrity and board members Anita Bartschat, Joe Hige and Cyndy Jankowski voted to eliminate the positions for the 2012-13 school year. Scott Craig voted against the layoffs. Ken Roth and James Mazurek were not present for the vote.

In place of the laid off media specialists, three part-time paraprofessionals will be hired. A part-time media professional will be kept on to oversee the paraprofessionals. Media specialists work with students in a variety of ways such as checking out books in the library and helping with research for classes. In Northville, the media specialists also provide technology instruction.

Donnie Durant, who is a media specialist in the district, addressed the board. She said her responsibilities will now fall on teachers, parents and others to pick up the slack of the cut positions.

Nick Nugent, president of the teachers' union, the Northville Education Association, also pleaded with the board to make cuts elsewhere.

"This is a cut that's not going to heal," he said.

Tom Boomer, a teacher at , said cuts in other areas should have been considered. Foreign language instruction cuts would have been more useful, he said.

"I think this is going to take us back a little bit," Boomer said, adding that the cuts will undo relationship-mending that has occurred between teachers and the board last year. He also said that cutting the media specialist positions with the expectation that teachers take on those responsibilities will result in a loss of teacher planning time.

Several board members defended and spoke about the difficulty of the decision before them.

Craig asked the board to table the vote for a few more weeks so that an alternative could be found.

"We can kick this can down the road for weeks. We can delay it. At the end of the day, that's why we're here," said Garrity. "In part, we haven't (in the past) made cuts we should have made."

She added, "Until we get more funding, our hands are tied."

Superintendent Mary Kay Gallagher said that ultimately an unpopular cut would have to be made, whether it's media specialists or foreign language instructors.

"There was great thought put into these recommendations," she said.

The cuts will amount to about $174,000 in savings for the district, said Northville Schools' assistant superintendent of finance and operations. The goal of the layoffs is to "not impact class sizes."

Board member Jankowski told the media specialists in attendance: "This is not a reflection on how you do your jobs...No matter where we cut, somebody's name is going to be on the (layoff) list."