This story has been updated.
Sara Galindo was caught off guard in the weeks before the San Antonio Independent School District’s spring break in March when an unusual number of colleagues at Rhodes Middle School started stopping into her library to see how she was doing.
Some teachers averted eye contact with her in the halls of the school, while others embraced her.
Despite being asked just weeks earlier to stay on as a librarian at the Westside campus for another five years, an uneasy feeling grew within the 36-year educator, who spent the last 24 years in the library, a place she called “the heartbeat of the school.”
That feeling hit a fever pitch when an invite popped up in her inbox for a meeting with the principal just days before spring break.
“He told me that there were no allocations for librarians, and that my position was being cut,” Galindo recalled tearfully. “I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me.”
Galindo’s was one of 27.5 librarian positions cut from schools for the 2023-24 school year to match staffing with a dwindling number of students, according to documents and statements from an SAISD spokeswoman. Another 28 campuses cut family engagement specialists. Other schools already had too few students to allocate funds for a librarian.
The most recent cuts leave less than a third of campuses across SAISD with a certified librarian — about 30 remain — as paraprofessionals or librarian assistants take on the most basic functions of the role instead.
A spokeswoman for the district said in a statement that library services will continue to be provided at all campuses.
According to National Center for Education Statistics data, the number of librarians has been falling in the district since the 2017-18 school year, reflecting state and national trends.
The cuts come despite subpar academic scores in reading and a body of research tying certified school librarians to higher academic achievement.
Top district leaders have said the most recent budget process gave autonomy and freedom to campus leaders to tailor cuts to their specific needs. But interviews with current and former librarians and family engagement specialists reveal a disjointed process for deciding the reductions, with unclear communication and mismatched decision-making resulting in a breakdown in trust rippling through both educators and parents as the start of the school year nears.
That could challenge the district officials as they navigate the emotionally fraught process of choosing school campuses to close in the 2024-25 school year to ensure district resources are equitably distributed. An initial draft of recommendations is expected on Sept. 18.
Some employees who had their positions cut took other jobs in the district, while many left for similar roles in neighboring districts. All positions were prioritized for other roles they were qualified for, if they chose to stay, according to a district spokeswoman.
Galindo, hurt by the careless communication of her position being cut, retired. In a separation letter sent to top district staff and obtained by the San Antonio Report, she described her feelings:
“The replacement of librarians with library clerks and instructional assistants is an insult to everyone who gave their time, effort and money in their pursuit of a master’s degree,” she said in the letter. “SAISD is doing a disservice to the community.”
Parents and students protested the cuts shortly after they were announced, speaking out during public comment in meetings and to campus administrators.
Multiple families implored the board during a March board meeting to intervene in the decision to eliminate the job of a librarian at Hawthorne Academy, Bonnye Cavazos.
“She has inspired her kids to be not just good readers, but good citizens,” Bill Aylor said.
One Hawthorne student called Cavazos “the heart of the school.”
“When we don’t have the heart, the body does not run correctly,” she said. “Please reconsider letting … her go, because we love her.”
Giving campuses autonomy
Early in his tenure, Superintendent Jaime Aquino came to the school board with a variety of budget maneuvers to better align district resources with the work happening in the classroom and avert a financial crisis as cratering enrollment continues to reduce the funding received from the state each year.
Resources are being redirected to the classroom, with budget cuts focused on slimming down central office staff by eliminating vacant positions to make way for a historic raise to retain the personnel key to ensuring success.
But a central problem district leaders are trying to address remains: campuses with small and large enrollment receive resources at a similar rate, raising the costs per student at under-enrolled schools and hindering the ability of the district to provide quality education to everyone.
“We’re having to make sure that we’re not funding campuses exactly the same way, regardless of the number of the students they have,” board President Christina Martinez said in an April interview. “We were funding the school that had 200 students with the same allocations that we did at a larger school.”
So as a precursor to the school closure discussion, with the board’s blessing, district leadership passed down funding totals to campuses closely related to the enrollment of students and gave campus leaders the choice of how to spend those funds. One librarian, who spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, said those allocations came with recommended positions earmarked for removal, including librarians.
What happened next varies depending on how campus leadership chose to proceed.
A disjointed process
Rawan Hammoudeh, the principal at Agnes Cotton Academy, said she instituted a transparent conversation early on at the pre-K to 8th grade campus in North San Antonio.
“I did explain it right away to my teachers, because I’m also very, very transparent,” she said. “I go ‘Look, this is what’s happening. Let’s look at this and let’s make this decision together.'”
The district was the most transparent it had been in years in revealing the amount of money that would be going to each campus, and why, she said.
“This is the very first time in a while that there was so much transparency on how much funding went to each campus,” she said. “Our campus is going to get this much funding because we have this many students.”
Cotton Academy cut both the position of librarian and the role of family and community engagement specialist for the upcoming school year — positions that sat vacant despite recruiting efforts for the last several years. The jobs were also eliminated despite the school getting an increase in funding tied to a rise in enrollment, Hammoudeh said.
But a cross-section of the campus met to discuss the change and settled on the creation of a new operations coordinator position that combines the position of librarian and family engagement specialist into one, with the added responsibility of overseeing campus safety and operations. A librarian assistant will also assist with librarian duties.
The new coordinator is a certified teacher with a focus on reading, according to Hammoudeh, but is not a certified librarian.
That is still an upgrade, Hammoudeh said, after years of teachers stepping in to do the role of the librarian and assistant principals doing family outreach.
Janie Flores, the former librarian coordinator for the district, said the process wasn’t that smooth everywhere. Flores left the job at the end of the last school year over disagreements about what the job should entail.
“Some principals made that decision on their own. Some principals asked their staff to decide whether they should let go of the librarian or not,” she said, “which was very difficult for the teachers to have to say.”
Other librarians, who spoke anonymously due to the fear of retaliation, described a much different process at their schools.
Some, like Galindo, heard of cuts coming before talking to their principals. Others learned in a casual meeting that they would keep their positions that would be modified.
One librarian was told they would have to split their time between two schools and learned upon arriving at the second school that the librarian there had been offered the same arrangement, but did not accept it. If they had, the first librarian would have been out of a job just weeks before the end of the school year.
“People experienced different processes,” the first librarian said.
The experience has that librarian applying for other jobs, even though he was able to hang on to his position this year.
With the varying approaches, group chats and whisper networks exploded with fear over the coming year. Some librarians began applying elsewhere before they got the news. Others didn’t learn about their fate until after spring break.
Many protested outside the board room alongside teachers asking for raises in March, asking instead to keep their jobs.
Not just checking out books
As the dust settled and the reality of the new situation became clear, Galindo and others began to worry about what would become of the collections they had spent years building and maintaining and the students they served. A district spokeswoman said that all collections and activities would continue to be provided across the district.
Others shared worries about clubs, extracurricular activities, University Interscholastic League (UIL) competitions and the institutional knowledge that comes with interacting with every part of a school.
Flores, the former library coordinator, said the cuts don’t make sense with SAISD’s overall goals.
“It sends mixed messages when the school board says our top priority is reading, and you eliminate librarian positions,” she said. “You have a reading specialist, but the reading specialist is not trained to work in a library.”
That’s also what the research shows, according to Deb Kachel, an affiliate faculty member at Antioch University Seattle, who pointed to more than a decade’s worth of research on school librarian impact studies that have found that schools with certified librarians have better academic outcomes than those that don’t.
Kachel, who is also the project director for a study exploring the decline of school librarians nationwide, said that there are disparities in the availability of high-quality libraries and certified librarians.
“The kids that are coming from the wealthier schools are being taught that. They’re being taught research skills, they’re being taught how to cite sources, and find authentic sources,” she said, “And then they compete in the same colleges that these kids go to that come from schools without any school library training.”
“It’s an equity issue. We’re just not doing right by the students,” she added. “And it’s not fair that the kids that live in the wealthy zip codes are the ones that have the advantage.”
Flores recalled one middle school librarian collaborating with an English as a second language (ESL) teacher on campus to match scores from the Measurement of Academic Progress (MAP) test with different book levels.
“She made bookmarks for them, letting them know, this is what your Lexile level is now, this is what you need to read … at this level in order to improve,” Flores said. “Well, that first semester, the kids in that class used that bookmark to pick their books that they wanted to read. When they took that test, again, they had increased about 40 points.”
According to Flores, that type of knowledge is unique to librarians, who can interface with every part of the school, and with students from grade to grade. Kachel said less certified employees are unlikely to fill that role sufficiently.
“They can check out books, they can make displays, they can have computers in a room and monitor a study hall, but they cannot teach,” she said.
Hammoudeh, the Cotton Academy Principal, said the decision made this year is not necessarily permanent, with future allocations dependent on future needs. In the meantime, she said the campus will be adding the content that was taught in the library into classroom lessons.
Kachel said that is unlikely to work.
“Our classroom teachers already have so many curriculum standards and requirements that they can barely teach in the number of school days that they have,” she said. “Now to dump something else on them that they haven’t even had training on … it is most likely not going to happen.
“If it happens, it’s going to be very slipshod, like one teacher who really embraces that is going to do a really good job,” she added. “The kids that happen to have that teacher are going to be prepared, and kids who have another teacher who doesn’t even understand information literacy [are not going to get taught it].”
