In Canada, Windsor Ontario has been one of the cities hardest hit by the economic downturn, and despite earnest efforts by creative and forward thinking residents, times are still tough.
The city has been making news this week because the hard pressed Catholic School Board is pretty much gutting its school libraries.
Here’s Windsor-Essex District Catholic School Board director of education Paul Picard’s brainstorm:
His “lightning moment,” he said, came when he was sipping a tea at a Starbucks and observed a student next to him working a laptop, an iPod and her cellphone as she completed an assignment. “She said, ‘This is how I learn,’” said Picard, who concluded the board must move to where its students are. The new library — the board calls it a learning commons area — won’t be hush-hush quiet, he said. “It’s a much more boisterous hub, much like you would see at a student centre at the university,” with wireless connections and a teacher (a library technician isn’t a teacher, so can’t fulfil that role, he said) helping them with research and digital literacy. “That’s their world, that’s where we have to meet them,” Picard said.
Meanwhile, elementary school libraries will become “flex rooms” with computers, he suggested, while the board tries to put 1,000 books in each classroom to foster literacy. Responding to studies that link school libraries to improved student literacy, he said you can find studies that validate anything, and there is “extensive” research that backs putting more books in classrooms.[source]
That sounds nice. More education policy should be based on this “Hey, it works for Starbucks” method. Perhaps, the school board could also charge for books and play corporate tie-in music over the PA.
But seriously, Picard’s vision looks like an effort to glamourize something more dire. A recent Globe and Mail editorial points this out:
At two high schools overseen by the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board, a grand total of three books was checked out last month. That depressing fact is cited by Paul Picard, the board’s director of education, as one reason for a radical change now under way, changing libraries from book-centred and quiet places to noisy digital hubs…
The main reason, though, is that the board faces a loss of 800 to 1,000 students in September, and a budget shortfall of about $10-million. Cutting most of its “learning commons specialists” (technologists, not teacher-librarians) will save $2½-million a year. In their stead, visiting literacy specialists will provide much more useful advice, Mr. Picard says.[source]
Hard times, indeed. In response, Windsor area high-school students have protested and the Catholic School Board is trying(poorly) to calm things down. The furor may die down, but this could be a budding trend. This is worrisome.
This policy is a little ham-fisted with regard to Ontario education policy which has long supported libraries. The Ontario School Library Association has publicly pointed to research that argues against Picard’s outlook. But the Catholic School Board in Windsor has already shown itself unready to consult widely on such a dramatic move in policy. It’s also shameful that the school board chose to try to coat these cuts in a thin veneer of coffee-house-learning-commons-ism.
Librarians and library techs are already laid off. Elementary schools libraries have been closed and the books distributed to classrooms. Hopefully, it can be turned around. Though right now, it looks like another strike for a town struggling against a “Worst Town in Canada” rap.
Parts of the Globe editorial that I found interesting:
” Libraries have survived for roughly 5,000 years of human history, but it is fair to insist they adapt to an age in which information is so often floating free – or die. Libraries should not be content to live in the 20th century, as it were. The mantra, as in any service, should be to keep up with what the public wants. Good libraries provide Wi-fi access (an Internet connection for wireless devices), e-books and audio books, electronic databases and, of course, computers. ”
Libraries aren’t content living in the 20th century. If a Globe editorialist were to have a look at a library professional journal, they would find not only a lack of contentment with the 20th century, but rather something closer to a frenzied obsession with new technologies. Find me the ‘bad library’ that doesn’t provide Wi-fi, e-books, electronic databases — or at least want to. Of those that exist, I’d bet nine times out of ten it’s due to lack of funding, rather than Luddite librarians.
On to the Globe’s next sentence:
“More expertise, not less, is needed to help students navigate.”
At which point I lose track of whom the Globe addressing. Librarians? I’m sure they would agree, more expertise would help. The policy-makers that are getting rid of personnel, rather than hiring different sorts of personnel? Well, if so, let us know, Globe. Are you saying that it’s short-sighted and clumsy to simply get out the axe and start hacking away at library staff, rather than rethinking whom gets hired through library staffing processes – are you calling for a maintenance of funds required to maintain staff levels; maybe even for an increase in funding, to get more highly qualified people in? I know that it’s pretty out of fashion, but if the Globe is arguing that libraries deserve a bucking of the trend in terms of decreasing or increasing flows of public funding to public institutions, it’d be nice if the Globe editorial board would actually say so.
Speaking of trendiness, the Globe ultimately offers libraries contradictory advice on this score. “Keep up with the times,” they say, in terms of technology, implying that libraries aren’t – despite the fact that librarians are already obsessed with technology. “Ignore the trends, drop the silly jargon” they tell us, on the other hand, of the propensity to use information society jargon in how librarians talk about libraries. But these are different facets of the same jewel. Is blindly following whatever’s new and of-the-moment only bad when it involves language? Why wouldn’t it be a misguided approach for technology, too?