Fred “Fel” lee’s misleading defense for cutting librarians.

I like the honorable Mr. Lee but his defense of cutting librarians is laughable at best and misinformed and deceptive at worse.

He was quoted in the folio saying, the School Board was faced with the problems of limited dollars.
"While there was an original plan submitted by our superintendent to fund media specialists in every school in 2013-'14, budget realities did not afford us an opportunity to adopt that plan," Lee said.

Well that’s not true. The district was required to keep 3 percent of its budget in reserves, some 28 million but instead chose to keep 7 percent some 65 million, well friends if we would have kept just six percent, double what we were required to we could have afforded librarians.

He then commented about how all our schools now had reading coaches and they were in effect taking the place of librarians, well the truth is most of our schools already had reading coaches and certainly most of the schools that lost librarians did.

But the craziest thing he said was, there are media clerks, teachers and staff who are using and enhancing library use,"

This is what he might think is going on but the reality is much different. Random classes may be meeting in some libraries so some learning is going on but for the most part they stand empty and please don’t take my word for it, ask a teacher.

I wish one of these guys, Lee, Czar, or Vitti would just say, look its 2013, we’re smart and if we need some information we have access to the internet at our homes and on our phones and since we have people who write our papers for us we don’t need libraries, and since we don’t need them, well, we don’t think anybody else does either.  

That would at least be honest.

http://folioweekly.com/School-Libraries-Lost,7388