Report: “Information Literacy Lost: Most Chicago Public Schools No Longer Have Librarians

From The Chicago Tribune:

Students in three out of four Chicago Public Schools won’t have access to a librarian this fall — one result of years of budget cuts. The district has budgeted for fewer than a third as many librarians in 2017-18 as it did in 2012, when nearly every school library was staffed.
The district budgeted for about 454 librarians in 2013, but only 139 for the 2017-18 school year, according to CPS data.
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CPS would not provide historical data on how many librarians worked in which schools, but as recently as 2012, there was at least one librarian per school, according to the CTU. Now, swaths of schools on the South and West sides have no librarians at all and the majority of schools that do are concentrated on the North side of the city, according to a Tribune analysis.
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School libraries are the main source of books for many students, but especially for those living in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, where children are less likely to have books or internet at home.

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Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News, School Libraries