So where have all the librarians gone?
Cusick said there’s not a shortage, like Byrd-Bennett stated, and it’s not that librarians are being laid off. It’s that they’re being re-assigned to classrooms..
“There are a number of certified librarians who are in classrooms,” Cusick explained. “English classrooms, world languages, in elementary schools, teaching a particular grade level. The people are there, they’re just not staffing the library, they’re staffing another classroom.”
Some of the city’s best-performing schools have eliminated full-time librarians.
That’s what happened at Nettelhorst Elementary in East Lakeview last school year. Scott Walter is a parent representative on the local school council at Nettelhorst and a librarian at DePaul University.
“We got down to the point of saying, well, we have a classroom and it doesn’t have a teacher,” he said.