Editor’s Note: This article is an edited version of the keynote address Sarah Logan presented at the Women in Library Advocacy: iSchool EDI Women's History Month Symposium in April 2024. You can view the speech and subsequent panel discussion here.
Thank you to Dr. Chow and the SJSU iSchool for inviting me to speak today. I’m thrilled to be back with San Jose State, my alma mater, to share my experiences as a teacher-librarian and library advocate.
I must admit I made the mistake of googling the distinguished speakers on today’s panel, and I was immediately struck with imposter syndrome. What am I, a lowly elementary school librarian who spends her days making silly voices and reminding students to keep their hands to themselves, doing presenting the keynote before a panel filled with such distinguished college professors, authors, and award winners? How exactly did I go from someone juggling online iSchool courses with my young family to a person who gets asked to speak to librarians? Don’t they know I’m just an elementary school librarian???
And then I realized something—I am in it. I am in the school library every day, delivering lessons, handing out band-aids, talking students into reading books, reminding them to use kind words, helping them use the catalog, handing out tissues, checking out books, asking them about the books they’ve read, curating a collection for readers from ages 5-11, marveling at their fan art of Cat Kid and Dog Man, fundraising, assessing learning, completing report cards for 500+ students, supporting my staff, and running school-wide initiatives.
This is Women’s History Month, and I think it’s worth noting that perhaps my belief that my work is not “worthy” of a keynote speech boils down to the fact that I work in a female-dominated field—education—with some of our youngest students. Caring for young children, historically speaking, has been the work of women—generally, the unpaid or under-paid work of women, and work that many still consider insignificant. Perhaps some of my imposter syndrome is really just “woman” syndrome. Maybe I’ve internalized the message that working with children is insignificant.
But believe me, the work that I do, and that teacher-librarians across our country do, is incredibly significant.
My mission is to help young people learn to ask and answer questions, to help them fall in love with stories, and to empower them with tools to learn any information or skill they might ever need.
My charge is to expose small humans to stories that are both familiar and strange, allowing them to practice making decisions and having experiences through the safety of the written word, helping them develop the tools to navigate this world, and nurturing their ability to be empathetic, thinking beings.
I am entrusted with the lives of over 500 individuals who are, in the eyes of their caretakers, the most important beings on the planet. My job is to help them feel seen and heard, to let them know that their interests are important and worthwhile, and to introduce them to ideas that expand their horizons and allow them to dream bigger.
Like Jennifer LaGarde (aka LibraryGirl), I believe that literature, particularly children’s literature, has the power to improve the hearts and minds of all people. Giving stories to children helps grow the adults our world needs. It provides them with a roadmap to overcome the very real challenges in their lives and it helps them see that they can find their way forward. It helps them understand different perspectives and experiences, it shows them possibilities they didn’t even know existed, and it makes them better equipped to solve the challenges they will encounter both as children and adults.
The digital citizenship lessons I teach help students understand the need for balance in their lives: a balance between screen time and other things, a balance between their lives online and connections with real, face-to-face people, a balance between the curated version of life presented to them on social media and the reality that is where most of us live. This has to start early—before students have their own devices—and it has to continue throughout K-12 education and be constantly updated as technology changes, and librarians do just that.
The media literacy lessons I teach show young scholars that it is their responsibility to evaluate the information they read. I teach them that it is essential that they find the truth so that the decisions they make are the right ones for them. My hope is that by beginning these lessons as soon as children walk into public schools, we can grow a generation of citizens empowered to see past rhetoric and use actual facts when making decisions that impact themselves, their families, and our world. Our society is drowning in disinformation, and librarians are the life preservers who can teach people how to swim.
We need libraries and librarians now more than ever, and we especially need school libraries and school librarians at every level.
So maybe I am worthy of addressing you today, after all.
What I might have to offer to those who, in my opinion, have better credentials than me, is that I can tell you what life is like “on the ground” for folks working in school libraries. And, as someone raised in the Midwest, I tend not to sugarcoat the truth.
The truth is this is a difficult time to work in school libraries. Reduction in budgets and staffing, pandemic learning loss, escalating student behaviors, the elimination of entire library programs, book challenges, and constantly having to remind people of your value is exhausting. I graduated in 2012 and California has been fighting for school library equity since before I graduated—a fight that continues to this day.
Imagine that you deliver six programs a day to six unique audiences and coordinate larger, community-wide programming throughout the year. In addition, you are responsible for every other aspect of the library. That, my friends, is elementary school librarianship—and it is the best job I have ever held.
The truth is this is an amazing time to work in school libraries. Students have access to digital tools that allow them to curate and create their own content on an unparalleled scale. And they still like to read paper books! Despite technological advances, we know selecting and enjoying a book is just as important as ever—perhaps even more so. According to a University of Sussex study, just six minutes of silent reading can reduce stress levels by 68%—better and faster than going for a walk, listening to music, or having a cup of tea.1 As the person whose job is to get kids to fall in love with reading, I love knowing that I am giving them a skill that can make them more content human beings.
As AI tools become more prominent, school librarians will be at the forefront of creating guidelines for staff and students around the ethical use of AI and teaching about its limitations. School libraries are an ever-evolving, exciting place to work, and I get to see the impact of my work on my students' faces every day.
The truth is, any public-facing, publicly-funded work is difficult. And because libraries are one of the last places in our society that welcome everyone, library work is uniquely challenging. Because we welcome everyone into our spaces, the scope of patron needs is broad and changing, while our resources are limited.
But hasn’t that always been true? I first dipped my toes into advocacy in 2010, when I was still an iSchool student who lived in San Jose. The city of San Jose had built beautiful new library branches, but then, thanks to budget cuts, they were not going to be able to open them all and instead planned to reduce open days at branches that did remain open.
As a parent of small children and a library student, I needed access to the public library seven days a week. As a taxpayer, I was angry that the city would build branches designed to reach those who most need access to public libraries and then not open them. I started writing letters to the city council and mayor’s office. I connected with the friends group of my closest library branch. I created a Facebook group (it was 2010, remember) called “Save San Jose Libraries” to help spread the word.
Here’s what I learned about advocacy and politics from that experience:
By the time you hear about proposed cuts, it’s likely too late to do a lot about them.
Politicians like to threaten HUGE cuts and then claim they “saved” library funding by implementing a smaller cut.
Libraries, much like schools, are used as political footballs to tug at the heartstrings of voters.
If you make a lot of noise publicly, the director of the library system might reach out to you and invite you to come in for a chat. (Shout out to the since-retired Jane Light.)
I watched hours get slashed at San Jose Public Library branches. But, as the economy recovered, I also watched hours and staffing be restored. Today there are 25 locations in the San Jose Public Library System, and 17 of them are open seven days a week.
I’d love to say I’m responsible for that fact, but in truth, I am not. Still, I like to think my campaign played a small part in reminding those managing the budget that library access was vital to San Jose residents and needed to be expanded as revenue stabilized.
My next attempt at advocacy also started during my iSchool days, when I learned that less than 8% of California’s public schools at the time employed even one part-time, qualified teacher-librarian.
In order to complete my school library fieldwork in the fall of 2012, I had to travel to Palo Alto to find a school with an elementary teacher-librarian and to Cupertino to find a school with a full-time secondary teacher-librarian on site. High-wealth districts, it seemed, had funds for teacher-librarians while others did not—a common tale in America’s education landscape. In other districts, a certificated teacher-librarian at the elementary level was nearly unheard of, and many districts stretched teacher-librarians across multiple secondary sites when they existed at all. The same situation persists in California, Oregon, Washington, and many other states to this day.
Every week I went to Palo Alto and saw the collection those students could access. I watched their highly-trained teacher-librarian deliver lessons and support the classroom teachers in her building. And then I drove less than 30 miles away to my children’s school in South San Jose and saw their dilapidated library collection in a space run by a very kind clerk who was only on campus 12 hours per week and was desperate for donations of book tape.
The problem was overwhelming, and frankly, I did not have the time or knowledge to fix it. But the inequity in access to school libraries was glaring and has stuck with me ever since.
My own children were then school-aged, and, with private school out of reach and public school funding in California so lacking, I knew I could not change things in time for them. The clock was ticking; so in 2015, I chose to exercise my privilege for the benefit of my children and we relocated to Vancouver, WA, where our children could attend their neighborhood public school and have a certificated teacher-librarian, plus certificated PE, music, art, and dance teachers. As far as I was concerned, we had moved to an educational nirvana.
And then I dug a little deeper.
At Dorothy Fox Elementary, I walked into a library collection with an average copyright age of 1993. My site budget started at $1800 per year in 2015. Then in 2016, it shrank to $1500. I was not allowed to run fundraisers, and the PTA was in charge of the book fair and its profits. Still, I wrote grants, bought books out of my own pocket, weeded aggressively, and advocated for change.
I was shocked to learn that having my MLIS or even a teacher-librarian credential made me a rare hire, not the norm. Most of my colleagues were classroom teachers who moved into the school library with no job-specific training. Some of them took it upon themselves to learn what they needed to know to be teacher-librarians, while others saw no need to seek additional training just to learn to “check out books.”
I hope I don’t have to tell this audience that I do much much more than check out books. I write and deliver curriculum, and I am the collection development, procurement, and processing departments. I raise funds that more than double my budget and write grants so that I can improve our resources and bring in guest authors and engaging programming. I coordinate all-school programming, like reading challenges and all-school reads that create a culture of reading. I teach teachers and students how to use our online resources ethically. I connect teachers with resources that support their curriculum and make connections that facilitate cross-curricular assignments. I design a space that removes barriers between readers and books, where all students feel comfortable, seen, and valued. I teach 24 45-minute classes a week—and I have a “small” school. Some of my colleagues teach 30 classes a week.
I get to know 500+ students and create a collection that will appeal to their interests and learning needs. And yes, I read to kids and check books in and out. But that is not the whole of what I do, and students at schools that only pay someone to check books in and out are not getting the same educational experience as those with qualified teacher-librarians.
With all that said, the books on my shelves do matter. Eventually my administrator understood that having me in the library would only go so far to improve the reading culture on my campus: I needed a better collection. Without additional funds for my budget, she allowed me to take over the book fair and to run an additional fundraiser.
Let’s pause here for just a second. Public and academic librarians, I don’t know how much you know about your school library colleagues and how our jobs work. I am paid for 187 days of work. Students are on campus for 180 days a school year. My contract includes two evening event requirements: back to school night and an additional family event in the spring. Any work I do beyond that is a donation of my time.
So when my principal “allowed” me to run fundraisers and book fairs—and I am genuinely grateful she did—what she really allowed me to do was donate my time to raising funds for the library collection.
This is also true when I attend conferences outside my contract days, or when I create programming and materials at home, or when I work on buy lists from my couch while dinner cooks or do report cards on the weekends. It is not possible to do this job at the level I expect from myself within my contract hours, especially because I teach on a “fixed” schedule—meaning I have classes coming in at set times most of the day pretty much every day.
Managing a quality school library program required more of my time and energy than I could fit into my contract day. I was busy making progress in my own library, and it was working. My collection was improving, circulation was up, and I was getting to the point that I didn’t have to constantly generate all new curriculum. I could feel the culture of reading on my campus growing.
And then: April 13, 2020.
To say we were unprepared to shift to remote learning is a gross understatement. Particularly at the early elementary levels, technology demands on teachers had been minimal. Now we were asking them to teach entirely online with very little time for training. Many of my colleagues adapted quickly, but for some, the idea of teaching over Zoom carried additional anxiety based on a fear of technology and its seemingly unreliable nature.
In addition to teaching my own classes, I spent a lot of time walking teachers through the steps, joining their classes as tech support, and just assuring them that this was temporary and we’d get back to in-person learning eventually. I also spent a lot of time walking parents through the ins and outs of facilitating online learning for their students, troubleshooting Chromebooks, and finding resources to support their students from home. My workload increased, but then so did every educator’s and parent’s.
Thanks to my pandemic haze and perhaps a slight bit of deception on the part of my colleague Hillary Marshall, I became the Washington Library Association’s School Library Division chair. I honestly am not sure why I thought that was a good time to take on something new, but I said yes, and I have never regretted becoming more involved in WLA.
In that capacity, I was introduced to the enormity of the deficit of school libraries in Washington. I knew that many districts, my own included, allowed a person holding any teaching credential to work in the school library. What I did not realize is that there were many districts in Washington that did not employ even one teacher-librarian.
What I did not realize is that Washington law requires school boards to implement school library programs with site-based teacher-librarians “as the board deems necessary.” In other words, you have to do this thing—unless you don’t want to.
The SLIDE data, or School Librarian Investigation—Decline or Evolution? study, conducted by Debra Kachel, Keith Curry Lance, and others and funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, collected data about school library staffing from across the US. Thanks to the SLIDE study, I learned that:
No one in Washington was maintaining accurate records about who was staffing our school libraries. Researchers had to contact each district individually or use websites to gather data.
Outside the I-5 corridor (Portland to Seattle), our school library staffing is bleak. Even within this region, along the I-5 corridor, staffing is decreasing, not increasing. For example, most elementary schools in the Seattle Public Schools district share librarians across multiple buildings, especially those in lower-income neighborhoods.
School administrators often do not see or understand the value of qualified teacher-librarians. We have a branding problem.
Without a mandate for teacher-librarians, we will always be subject to budget cuts. You can’t have a classroom of second graders with no teacher, but you can technically have an unstaffed library. Even when administrators see the value of teacher-librarians, if our positions are not mandated and funded, they can’t keep us if they don’t have enough funding for classroom teachers.
I also became more familiar with how schools are funded in Washington. Our legislature created a prototypical funding model that outlines everything they think schools need to meet the basic education needs of our students, which is mandated in Washington’s Constitution. Teacher-librarians and school library materials are named in this prototypical funding model. The model is used to determine how much state funding is sent to each school district.
We also have something called “local control,” which is a political philosophy that means each individual school board gets to decide how to spend the money legislators in Olympia send them each year. This means that the presence of teacher librarians and library materials in the prototypical funding model does not mean school districts have to spend that money on teacher librarians or library materials. And most do not, because—and I know this is shocking—what legislators in Olympia believe it should cost to run a school does not align with what it actually costs to run a school.
In the 2022-23 school year, my WLA colleagues and I decided we were tired of being told by politicians that teacher librarians were funded only to hear district administrators say that we were not. We found legislative sponsors for a bill requiring all districts to ensure all students had access to qualified teacher-librarians. The bill passed the House but died in committee in the Senate after months of successful committee hearings in both chambers.
After that experience, morale was pretty low, and we decided to work toward a smaller, more achievable goal this year: having a staff member at the Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction focused on supporting and collecting data on school libraries. This relatively small ask—approximately $300,000 out of the entire state budget—was not granted, and despite being told by educational leaders in the state that the position would be requested again during the most recent budget hearings, it was not.
In the meantime, one of the largest school districts in my area eliminated secondary teacher-librarians last year and is planning to eliminate elementary teacher-librarians this year, leaving their entire school library program staffed by part-time paraprofessionals. The district my own children attend is cutting their secondary library staffing to halftime in an effort to reduce spending.
The nirvana I thought I moved to does not exist; instead of moving the needle forward, it feels like we are losing ground.
Now, I know it sounds like I’m feeling defeated and ready to give up.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While we have not yet achieved our legislative goals, we have learned a few things that will serve us as we carry this fight forward.
For one thing, we have to do a better job of articulating our value. Administrators, classroom teachers, our colleagues in public, academic, and special libraries, parents, grandparents, and community members—everyone needs to understand why it matters that school libraries be staffed by qualified teacher-librarians. The general public needs to be disabused of their assumptions that our schools have teacher-librarians, and they need to understand why who is in the library is just as important as what is in the library.
It’s going to take more than my voice to make that a reality. It’s going to take more than school librarians to make that a reality. We need to cultivate advocates from outside library circles, and we need to make it impossible to ignore our value by highlighting what happens in school libraries at every opportunity.
As a group, we have got to become part of the curriculum in teacher- and administrator-preparation programs. No educator or school administrator should begin their career without having some exposure to the benefits of strong school library programs. We need educators to report for their first day of work expecting to find a librarian in their library—not being shocked if they do. And while I don’t mind teaching my administrator what my job is, it seems backwards that the person who evaluates me needs me to tell them what I should be doing. My friend, Eryn Duffee, who is here today, remembers having to tell her first administrator that she was, in fact, a certified teacher: a requirement to even apply for the job she held.
School administrators seem to love data, so let's make sure they see the data around the impact of qualified teacher-librarians before they are in a position to make decisions that impact school library staffing.
Librarians, submit your name for that award. Write an article for a journal for school administrators. Present at the social studies, English, math, or science teacher conference. Become active in your local education union. Run for president of your state library association. Run for city council, or school board, or the state legislature! Librarians are more than qualified to hold public office because we know how to find out what we don’t know.
Focus on the solutions that libraries and librarians can provide for those in power. What are the goals of your school district, university, city, or state, and how can your library help reach those goals? In other words, don’t always go to those in power with an ask; offer to help them, show them how you can help them, and then deliver—that will often pay off in ways more direct advocacy will not.
Form relationships with decision makers. Contact legislators to say thank you at least as often as you contact them to ask for their support on an issue. Show up to local town halls or events (even if you didn’t vote for the person). Let them start recognizing you as an engaged citizen who cares about many issues, not just libraries. Remind them that you are also their constituent and that they work for you.
Create opportunities for mutually beneficial publicity. Invite local leaders to your library space and create photo ops that can be shared on social media. Every opportunity to highlight the work you do is also an opportunity for elected officials and administrators to do positive PR work. When those in power think of libraries and library workers, we want them to have a positive reaction.
We also need to implement more aggressive advocacy strategies to combat the budget cuts, book challenges, and de-professionalization of teacher-librarians.
We must start calling out the inequity behind school library staffing. Nationwide data demonstrates over and over that the students least likely to have access to qualified teacher-librarians are those from historically marginalized populations and those experiencing poverty. At the same time that Soo-Yung Lee and colleagues published findings that access to quality school library collections nearly cancels out the impact of poverty on reading test scores, schools whose student populations experience poverty most are the least likely to have access to quality school library programs. In other words, we know that school libraries matter the most to students experiencing poverty but that those same students are the least likely to have access to them.
Identify the elimination of school library programs for what it truly is: a form of book banning. When a library doesn’t have a qualified teacher-librarian curating the collection, the collection is less likely to have quality content with diverse representation. Without a librarian, who will defend books when they are challenged? (And trust me, this deficit is no coincidence in today’s climate.) Eliminating teacher-librarians essentially guarantees that there will not be equitable representation on the shelves. This is a fact backed by research.
School librarians need our library colleagues to explicitly name this issue. Every conversation about book challenges that you take part in must also include a conversation about the systemic dismantling of school library programs, because eliminating teacher-librarians is an effective form of book banning.
Challenge the misconceptions around reading and the need for libraries. When asked about the lack of a teacher-librarian in their district, a school board member in Washington recently said that “our kids don’t read, anyway.” As someone who works with over 500 K-5 students daily, I am here to tell you that is not true. My students read voraciously. I am currently wrapping up a reading challenge at my school. Our goal as a school community was to finish 8,000 books. As of today, they are at 12,300 with a few days left to go.
This year on my campus, 81 fourth and fifth graders voluntarily participated in a Battle of the Books program. This is a competition that involves reading chapter books and answering questions about them; more than a third of my students chose to participate. Without a teacher-librarian, students lose access to such programs.
When schools have library collections with high-interest, engaging, and age-relevant materials, when students have the support of a librarian trained in readers’ advisory, and when school administrators view the job of teacher-librarian as both instructor and program administrator, the end result is students who read wider and deeper, thereby developing empathy and understanding—keys for a successful society. What’s more, teacher-librarians provide important instruction in digital citizenship, media literacy, information literacy, and instructional technology both for students and for staff.
We are trained to teach this content to the same degree a math teacher is trained to teach the Pythagorean theorem and English Language Arts (ELA) teachers are trained to teach grammar. We are the experts, but we are consistently left out of the conversation on this important aspect of modern education. Librarians, I implore you to push your way onto curriculum and standards committees. Take every opportunity to remind those adopting state standards that they should already have a teacher trained to teach this content. Trust me: your English teachers do not want to add our content to their already overflowing plates.
Fellow librarians, educators, parents, and community members, please keep putting pressure on organizations like ALA and AASL to show up for school libraries in a way that actually makes an impact. I would love to see a nationwide media campaign focused on educating the general public about the value of qualified teacher-librarians. Nationwide, parents need to understand that they cannot assume their child has access to a teacher-librarian.
Our advocacy must go beyond warm and fuzzy missives about books and reading and get into the real data we have around the impact teacher-librarians have on student achievement. We need a well-designed, widespread media campaign that will stick with people the way the “this is your brain on drugs” campaign is burned into the minds of anyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s. No one state can accomplish this alone and teacher-librarians cannot either—but when we join forces (and funds), perhaps we could create library advocates from the broader community.
I encourage you to keep educating those who work in different environments about the challenges in your field. For school librarians, our main challenge right now is existing. But I know my public library colleagues also have very real concerns about safety, funding, and intellectual freedom.
As an individual, my focus is on advocating for school libraries, but as WLA president, my job is to advocate for all libraries and library workers. My colleagues in public, academic, and special libraries, I know you also face challenges. We are stronger when we work together to meet those challenges, and as WLA president I continue to look for ways to connect with colleagues in different library settings to learn their concerns and how the Washington Library Association can help.
Obviously, the challenges facing school libraries are numerous and complex. Public school funding is an enormous challenge, and since every state funds schools differently, this is a fight we will need to win multiple times in multiple ways. There is no one straight line to achieving equity in school library staffing. If I’m being honest, at times the fight feels overwhelming.
But I believe in the importance of this work. I believe in our essential role in education, as resources and allies for both students and teachers. I know that it is because of my work that second graders whisper “I love reading” to me when I pass them in the hall. I know that it is because of my work that a fifth grader felt safe sending me an email asking for books on gender identity. I know that my work makes a measurable impact in terms of test scores. But, more importantly, I know that my work changes the lives of my students, especially my most vulnerable students.
When I think about the challenges facing school library advocates, I can’t help but think of the musical Hadestown by Anais Mitchell. When Orpheus turned around and looked at Euridice and she disappeared—even though I knew that was going to happen—I gasped.
I gasped because I believed it was possible that this time the ending would be different. Then Hermes reminded me:
My friends, believe it might turn out this time. Believe that it is possible for the ending of our story to change. Find a reason to start singing and then keep singing.
I, for one, am going to sing it again and again until it ends differently. Together, we can form a mighty chorus that will change the library landscape—and the world—for the better.
Sarah Logan is the Teacher-Librarian at Dorothy Fox Elementary in Camas, Washington, and currently serves as the Washington Library Association Board President. Prior to moving to Washington in 2015, she was the Teacher-Librarian at Lynbrook High School in San Jose and earned her MLIS from San Jose State in 2012. Sarah has a reputation for actively participating in professional organizations and creating engaging, student-centered school library programs that promote authentic reading cultures. She is also a passionate advocate for access to quality school library programs and has been instrumental in the #K12Librarians4AllWA campaign, which seeks to increase the number of Teacher-Librarians in Washington’s K-12 public schools. She will continue to advocate for Washington’s students until they all have access to quality school library programs with qualified Teacher-Librarians.
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