Houston Independent School District is eliminating librarians, yes,
you heard me right eliminating librarians at 28 schools this next school year.
And some of those schools, the libraries,
will be converted to so-called team centers for kids with behavioral issues.
Now click to Houston reported on this, and they wrote that this comes as part of
the new Superintendent Mike Miles's reform program new Education System, or NES.
Currently, there are a total of 85 schools that have joined Miles's program,
and of those, 28 campuses will lose their librarians.
The district said they will have the opportunity to transition to other roles
within.
The district now click to Houston spoke with some former librarians in
the Houston area that worked in these school districts.
And what they had to say was honestly just it can just be described as
extremely depressing.
So retired Houston Independent School District teacher in charge of library
Lisa Robinson had this to say, It was such a joy to help them find the perfect book.
She said those stories are now ripped to shreds, my heart is just broken for
these children that are in the NES schools that are losing their librarians.
Now, the current librarians are not categorically let go as the quote earlier
alluded to, but the district is moving some of them into different positions.
But one major concern with this decision is that it will lower
students in the district's already exceptionally low reading levels.
Former HISD librarian and manager of library services Janice Newsum believes
eliminating librarian positions could hurt reading performance even more.
Quote when students engage in reading as an activity of choice, they are not only
building that reading muscle, but they are also developing their vocabulary.
They are understanding a bit about the world that exists
outside their block radius, said Newsum.
And, of course, because this is the story of all of this attack on public education,
a lot of teachers and
librarians have raised concerns about libraries being closed in schools.
Specifically in low income areas, while schools in wealthier areas excuse me,
get to keep their librarians and keep their libraries, of course.
As for what happens to the libraries once there's no librarians,
click to Houston reported that some of the library spaces will now be turned into
team centers designed for students to work individually.
Or in teams throughout the school day,
students with behavioral issues will also be placed in the team center,
where they will be able to join their class virtually.
Now, Texas, not very incidentally,
is the state that has banned the most books from its public school libraries.
And Jenk, you know, as someone who used to work in education, this is really
concerning to me, I mean, I think it should be concerning to everybody.
I don't think this can be described as anything but
an attack on public education, and seeing that they're specifically targeting
schools in low income areas, I mean, it's also an attack on the poor.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, so
I'm gonna explain six different reasons why they're doing this.
So both against librarians and teachers, so first of all,
you know the culture wars, right?
And that has two components to it, one is they know that their base loves the anti
LGBTQ talk, the anti-theoretically critical race theory, but
now all of a sudden, they're showing their hand and saying.
Well, we don't really want to teach most of black history, and
we wanna pretend that there were some good things that happened in slavery, and so
thank you for at least admitting who you are, right?
But there's a second part of the culture wars, which is distraction,
because they desperately need their voters not to see,
that they're not proposing any bills to help them.
I dare anyone to show me 1 bill from Republicans that actually helps their
voters economically, they would never do that cuz they work for corporations.
So which leads to their war on teachers, and
that has four reasons, one is also a distraction, so
while you should be incredibly angry at bankers and private equity guys, etc.
That are destroying this country and have bought all of our politicians,
meanwhile they're like, no, not the bankers, not the bankers,
because those are their top donors.
The teachers, the real problem is the teachers and the librarians,
can you believe they're trying to get your kids to read?
So that's another distraction.
And then they love indoctrination, this whole time they were like,
we're against indoctrination, we don't want that, okay?
You were trying to tell the kids that there was racism in this country, that's
indoctrination, we don't want that, but now they showed their hand on that, too.
Now Florida is bringing PragerU kids videos to indoctrinate the kids to
absurd conservative propaganda, so they love political correctness.
They don't want factual correctness taught to your kids,
that's why they're attacking teachers and librarians and
books, they want their own propaganda to be taught instead of actual history.
Another reason is because they wanna privatize the schools.
So if they destroy the public school system and they attack the teachers and
the librarians and you lose faith in them, they go, well, lucky for us,
our donors have another solution for you.
Why don't you pay a lot for private schools and we'll give you a voucher for,
I don't know, a quarter of it or so, but
we're gonna funnel all the money to those guys.
Did I get campaign donations from them, too?
And finally, the part nobody talks about, a lot of these folks,
especially the teachers, are in unions, and
those unions give money to Democrats, and the Republicans hate that.
That is why they wanna destroy the teachers in this country.
So the Democrats largely don't talk about that either,
cuz they don't wanna talk about donors at all cuz that gets everybody in trouble.
But that is a giant part of the reason why you see Republicans attacking teachers and
librarians over and over again.
In another era, that would have been insane, but
our Democrats never fight back, so, unfortunately,
these people are taking the brunt of this assault with almost no one to help them.
>> Speaker 3: And unfortunately, the Republicans continued push to basically
privatize access to opportunities and privatize just society in general.
Has really gutted this country's ability to function in any type of
efficient level.
And even if with everything infrastructure, healthcare, but
specifically here with education,
what type of ricocheting effects does this have?
Entire generations of students who aren't ready to participate,
not only in the modern job market, but where the job market is headed.
We're still putting kids through school as if they're gonna be at some company for
20 or 30 years, taking books away,
making it more difficult just to have access to basic knowledge.
The idea that slavery had some type of a benefit is absolutely ridiculous,
it's a lost cause or thing.
But still, the fact that this country is having this debate at all is,
at the end of the day, that's only making us more unable to compete internationally.
We're not able to compete with know, we're always talking about China this,
China that, well, our students aren't able to compete with them,
we're not getting them ready for anything.
So this also goes in our infrastructure problems.
Every single year it gets hotter, the hurricanes get worse,
the droughts get worse, and Hurricane Katrina wouldn't
necessarily have been as devastating as it was had those levees been fixed.
So this what we're looking at at with the education system, the attack on teachers,
it's happening in every sector of the country, and
it's really just making us fall back in every way imaginable.
Now, everything's more expensive to address than it otherwise would have been.