A year after Minneapolis Public Schools banked on the successful return of school librarians, St. Paul is headed into the coming year without licensed media specialists at the elementary level.

Librarians were among dozens of expert staffers to be cut as the state's second-largest district wrestled with a projected $100 million-plus budget deficit in 2024-25.

The shift comes amid a statewide push to improve student literacy, and after the other urban district in the Twin Cities saw a sizable jump in library book circulation once it added librarians.

In St. Paul, the loss may hit hardest at Crossroads Elementary, which never in its 25-year history has been without a licensed media specialist to stock its shelves and help instill in students a love for reading.

"We have been extremely lucky," said librarian Sarah Bober, whose 11-year run ends in August. "Crossroads has always had one of the biggest book-purchasing budgets."

District officials point to a shift in strategy favoring the placement of librarians at the secondary level and the need, when times are tight, to have all district libraries be open and accessible, plus consistently staffed — in this case, with teaching assistants (TAs) or educational assistants in grades pre-K-5. The district will continue placing librarians in grades K-8 schools.

Elementary schools have a limited amount of discretionary funds that they can use to invest in librarians, the officials say, but only four schools chose to do so in 2023-24. Now, there are none.

Last month, school board members voted 6-1, to let the proposed 2024-25 budget cuts stand, with Carlo Franco opposed — partly over the librarians issue.

"Yes, we're still replacing (the specialists) with some TA positions," he said. "But what is that impact?"

Minneapolis, for one, can tout the benefits.

A year ago, Minneapolis bucked national trends by bringing back professional librarians to an extent that it now has at least one half-time media specialist in each of its 60-plus schools.

The purpose, the district said, is to help students meet literacy goals and become readers for life, and when the time came to resolve a $100 million-plus budget gap of its own, the district left the positions in place.

"We find that our media specialists collaborate with teachers, and curate books and other materials that reflect the diversity of our students," officials said in a statement this week. "That's increased interest in reading among children of all backgrounds and the number of books being checked out."

Asked if St. Paul would prefer to have librarians if it could afford it, Andrew Collins, the district's executive chief of schools and learning, said this week: "I would love to have lots of supplementary positions in our elementary schools, and a media specialist would be one of many."

He said that placing people in each of the elementary libraries — even those who aren't licensed — is one way of creating a "print-rich environment" in the schools. The district also has invested about $700,000 in texts to distribute to teachers, some of whom have some "pretty amazing classroom libraries," Collins said.

Lessons from librarians

St. Paul's elementary library book circulation is up districtwide, nearly to a pre-pandemic high in 2015-16, according to figures covering the past nine years.

But a shift away from librarians to TAs will leave many teachers and secondary school librarians having to pick up some of the slack.

Bober wrote in a June 18 email to school board members that plans call for librarians at the secondary sites to provide about an hour per week of support to TAs at the elementary schools — extra work for people who "already have full-time jobs supporting their own schools," she wrote.

In an interview, Bober added that because TAs cannot order new books on their own, the secondary librarians may have a hand in helping make such choices "without knowing the school community, without knowing the students and without knowing what's in the collection."

Classroom teachers also may be called upon to deliver the digital literacy lessons previously taught by librarians, the district said. That is because the TAs — unlike Bober who taught four classes a day complete with lesson plans that she pulled together — are not licensed instructors.

Bober had a right to a district middle school or high school position, but was not interested. Instead, she is heading to Shakopee Public Schools, and to a nice perk: "For the first time in my life, I will have a set curriculum to use," she said. "I won't have to create from scratch."

And the TAs? The district says they'll be learning about team building and more when they return to school on Aug. 27.