The approximately 2,000 students and 100 staff at New Westminster Secondary School are feeling the effects of budget cuts as recent layoffs mean less access to the school’s library.
The school’s library technician was cut this year (along with another eight per cent of the workforce across the district), and the two remaining teacher-librarians are now required to teach a class each apart from their library duties.
“It’s the result of the cutbacks that have gone across the board, and the libraries were not exempt from those cuts,” said New Westminster Teachers’ Union president Grant Osborne. “The librarians had their library time cut back, and they’re doing more classroom teaching.”
The staffing changes mean there is less time available for the teacher-librarians to cover library classes.
“If you’ve got several classes in the library it’s challenging for one teacher-librarian to handle it,” Osborne said. “The reason the library has been cut is because everybody has been cut. Everybody. We are down to 10 per cent supply budgets, so libraries are not exempt from that.”
The library issue is “symptomatic” of the district’s large-scale cuts, said Osborne, whose union recently presented to the provincial select standing committee on finance and government services a dire report on the impact cuts have had in local classrooms.
In the union’s view, the provincial government needs to increase education funding to deal with funding shortfalls.
But Ministry of Education spokespeople say the government has actually increased per-pupil funding. Operating funding in the New West school district has risen from $35.3 million in 2000/01 to approximately $54 million in 2013/14, up by more than 50 per cent, ministry spokesperson Matt Silver said in a statement.
As for the NWSS library procedures, under the new guidelines, library hours will be from 8:25 a.m. to 3 p.m. There are also changes to booking procedures for teachers. As well, at lunchtime, a maximum of 40 students will be allowed to access the library, and the doors will be locked once that number is met.
No one from the school could be reached to confirm whether the new rules were devised by staff or by the school administrators, or whether they were determined collaboratively.
The New Westminster school district has a $4.4-million deficit from previous years and had to cut about 62 jobs to balance this year’s budget.
