Wanted: School librarians

LBJ Elementary librarian Mary Pharaoh loves being a librarian. She loves the books. She loves working with students. She loves teaching the students how to use the library.

Pharaoh taught first grade for 17 years before becoming a librarian. After getting her emergency certification, she has been working on her master’s in library sciences for the past two years.

She was nervous starting out, but once she was in the library, holding story time and teaching students to do research and find books, she knew she’d made the right choice.

“I did it because I just love children … There’s nothing more important you can do than teach a child to read. Without reading they can’t learn anything else,” Pharaoh said.

Pharaoh is something of an endangered species.

There has been a chronic shortage of librarians across the state of Texas for the past few years, and the reality of this finally hit ECISD this year, said Bruce Almond, ECISD’s human resources director over elementary education. There are five vacant school librarian positions available and while the ECISD human resources department employees received a number of applicants over the summer, they only found one qualified person to hire. Qualified school librarians are hard to come by, Almond said.

In May, three elementary school librarians retired from their posts in the Ector County Independent School District. They had 165 years of service between them. People often say that those who are retiring cannot be replaced, and in this case it’s literally true.

To become a librarian, a person has to obtain a bachelor’s degree and then get a master’s in library science. The University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University and Texas A&M Commerce are the only universities offering library science programs in the state, and they don’t graduate enough students to fill the demand within the state. When librarians retire, there’s not a line of applicants to replace them.

This has been a problem for the past few years, Almond said, but the school district has been lucky for a long time. For the past few years, the turnover rate for ECISD librarians has been relatively low, and the district has been able to fill vacancies by finding a qualified librarian or finding someone with six hours of library science credit who would have three years to work toward getting a master’s degree.

At the end of the school year, three longtime librarians retired adding to two existing vacancies human resources had been unable to fill. The librarian shortage became a stark reality.

The human resources department spent the summer sifting through resumes and coming up empty, human resources director Brian Rosson said. As the 2010-’11 school year has crept closer, the librarian position at Gonzales was the only one filled. The administration created four positions as library assistant, solving the problem for now.

The administration is piloting a program where library assistants will be hired to fill in the gaps, ECISD superintendent Hector Mendez said. The library assistants will assume many of the librarian duties and be overseen by one of the certified district librarians from another campus, Mendez said.

Mendez said the district is trying this solution to see if it works, but officials also will keep looking for qualified librarians.

On Thursday evening, four librarian assistantship positions were posted online at Austin Montessori, Burleson Elementary, Ireland Magnet and Ross Elementary. Almond said they had five or six applications submitted for each position by the next morning, and they hope to fill the spots as soon as possible. He said the successful candidate will have experience working with children and handling clerical work — and an associate’s degree is preferred. Those interested in the job should apply online, Almond said.

“We’re going down a new road. We’re in uncharted territory now because we’ve never had to do this before,” Almond said.