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 In total, about 50 people came to celebrate HISD libraries and library staff on Wednesday, May 14. Nusaiba Mizan of the Houston Chronicle brought a photographer, and offered this article: “HISD has just 23 librarians for 274 schools after move to turn libraries into discipline areas.” It showed in the print edition as a front page feature. You can see details of the event in our May newsletter. SNL continues its work to reconstitute libraries for ALL HISD schools in order to provide strong library services to EVERY HISD student. We succeeded in 2022 under former Superintendent Millard House, and we will again as the negative effects of the takeover recede. Please continue to speak out in support of all libraries. Every voice of support matters. As of April, the HISD library situation looked like this, with only 28 certified librarians by our records. We’re not sure where the Chronicle got 23, but they may have some info we don’t.  At least as best we can show as of early April. HISD library staffing is a moving target as librarians leave, whether pushed by campus admin decisions or by choice as they seek better job security. 23 (or 28) refers to certified school librarians; there are additional schools with certified teachers staffing the library as Media Specialists. On some NES campuses, a principal may instead designate an ancillary role to staff the library, and that person may or may not actually be working in the library. A campus may continue to list that they employ a certified school librarian, but that person is actually doing entirely unrelated work - perhaps as testing coordinator or even classroom teacher. SNL leadership has tried to keep up with all these nuances, but frequently we discover we’ve been misled. Schools want to pretend they offer library access when they do not.  This list is as correct as we could make it as of late April - but we know it is changing often, especially this time of year. As you see, only 33% of HISD schools have any library services; only 9% have certified librarians. The list does not differentiate between Certified School Librarians and Media Specialists who are certified teachers, or other assigned staff. SNL does not consider a library truly functioning if there is no assigned staff. That said, campus leaders often refer to whoever is staffing a library as a librarian, a blunder that implies more training than most library staffers have. [NOTE: The list of schools without functioning libraries appears at the end of the post.] Certified school librarians in Texas have 2-3 years of full-time classroom teaching experience and a Masters degree in addition to their library certification coursework and the state-mandated test. Those years teaching are what makes them so effective in supporting student learning across the campus as they work with both students and teachers to enhance classroom units of study.  The NES extreme focus on the Science of Reading (SOR) does a huge disservice to the breadth of student needs in support of strong literacy. A previous newsletter offered Scarborough’s Reading Rope to illustrate how the SOR skills (phonics, decoding, sight recognition) are only useful and interesting when they are embedded in broader applications that allow access to content knowledge. The NES version of SOR ignores the broader requirements of background knowledge, vocabulary, language structure under the misapprehension that if students can decode they are literate and can succeed on the STAAR test. Maybe students will show improvements on the STAAR in the short term, but they have no enthusiasm for reading or learning, nor do they have any stamina to read anything longer than the test length passages to which are all they are RESTRICTED during school hours. Without a campus library (and look on the map to see which parts of town have campus libraries), these students have no chance to become truly literate or college ready. On April 24, 2025, Education Week published “It’s Not Just About the Phonics” by Sarah Schwartz. This NEW article reiterates the ideas illustrated by the Reading Rope and reflects current 2024-25 research. The article also references a new (to me) term, disciplinary literacy,” which is defined as “[referring] to how an expert in a discipline (i.e., science, history, mathematics, literature, and other subjects) uses specialized knowledge and abilities to read, write, think and communicate. (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012; Jetton & Shanahan, 2012; Goldman et al., 2016). The NES curriculum allows no time to teach students how to read differently in different subject classes, or even just different kinds of books. The Houston Chronicle also offered this: “Less than 5% of HISD students at some NES high schools meet Texas' reading, math standards on SAT.” How can they possibly meet college standards if they never have the chance to read a whole book or learn how to read different kinds of information?  In April, this blog shared Suzanne Lyons’ If You Give a Kid a Library… She spells out all the things certified librarians do to enhance the student school experience for EVERY student on a campus. Please read it again.
Why focus so heavily in May on this information about why school librarians matter and which schools don’t have them? Because as we all head out for summer break from K-12 education, advocates for improved education in HISD - your friends here in Students Need Libraries - and those fighting the Takeover of HISD more broadly - CVPE - will keep working hard. Please support us by continuing to ask why there are not more staffed libraries in less-advantaged neighborhoods. Be the squeaky wheel. More voices are better.
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