Thanks to the hard work of our advocacy committee, we were able to meet with a representative of City Council member Lincoln Restler’s office. He and Education Committee chair Rita Joseph have been instrumental in drafting City Council Bill 1125.
For those not keen to reading legislation, these are the key takeaways as per the City Council site.
“A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to requiring the department of education to report on school librarians and library access in New York city public schools
This bill would require the Department of Education (DOE) to report annually information on school librarians and library access in DOE school. DOE would be required to report on the number of certified and non-certified school librarians, the number of students who have weekly scheduled class time with school librarians, the average amount of weekly class time students spend with school librarians, the number of school libraries, and the hours of operation of each school library.”
In essence, in our public school system, there is no clear way to know how many certified librarians, staffed libraries, and functioning libraries there are. These numbers can often be obfuscated by campus school scenarios where multiple schools are reporting the presence of one librarian or schools are reporting a librarian/library is present when students cannot access these said resources. This bill seeks to get the reports out into the open so we can actually see how many libraries and librarians are actually serving our students.
At present, the bill will be presented to the education committee sometime in the spring. This will be a public hearing and we encourage all members and advocates to attend these hearings to testify about the value of a school library and a certified school librarian.
There are currently 15 council members sponsoring the bill, so we also encourage to reach out to your local City Council member to encourage their support. To that end, we have drafted a form letter to help you do so! Please copy and paste this as needed!
Current sponsors: Lincoln Restler, Rita C. Joseph, Shahana K. Hanif, Justin L. Brannan, Shekar Krishnan, Shaun Abreu, Alexa Avilés, Chi A. Ossé, Tiffany Cabán, Selvena N. Brooks-Powers, Mercedes Narcisse, Christopher Marte, Carmen N. De La Rosa, Chris Banks, Lynn C. Schulman
Draft E-mail to Local City Council Member regarding Bill 1125
We will keep you updated, but know that the situation is dire. The number of librarians and libraries in our public school system is not as robust as in the past. We need a clear picture in order to push our future advocacy in making a functioning library for every school a reality!
New York City School Librarians' Association 