Lauren Comito
3:59:35
Thank you so much to speaker Adams, chairs Joseph and Rivera, and all the committee members for the opportunity to speak today on intro eleven twenty five.
3:59:45
My name's Lauren Camido.
3:59:46
I'm a librarian, a public librarian here in New York City and executive director of Urban Librarians Unite, five zero one c three library worker organization that advocates for and supports urban library workers across The US.
3:59:59
I'm also a New York City public school parent and PTA treasurer because I can't ever say no to signing up for things and I really need to learn how to do that.
4:00:09
As a public librarian, I am so fully and completely unqualified to fill the role of a school librarian and I have occasionally heard none in this room, elected officials say, well the public librarians can go do it.
4:00:26
You cannot put me in a room with 30 kids for like an entire day.
4:00:30
I cannot handle that.
4:00:32
I can take them in dribs and drabs with maybe their parents keep taking care of them and that is, that's my role.
4:00:39
School librarians are special.
4:00:42
They are, I don't know that I've ever seen one sit still.
4:00:46
Somehow they manage to serve the needs of entire school communities.
4:00:50
Sometimes between three schools and one building meeting the curricular needs of all of the teachers' research needs.
4:00:59
They're kind of magical unicorns with an ever changing curriculum.
4:01:05
The lack of school librarians creates a resource gap that public libraries cannot fill.
4:01:10
There is no way for us to do it.
4:01:12
If you've ever tried to find a book on a specific topic for a research project with like an eight year old and you've gone a couple days too late, you're just sort of out of luck.
4:01:21
We don't have 30 copies of books on Benjamin Franklin.
4:01:24
It's just not a thing.
4:01:27
But also as public librarians, get to, a public librarian, I get to see the results of what happens when we don't have a comprehensive library education in New York City schools.
4:01:37
And that looks like adults who can't find books alphabetically occasionally.
4:01:44
It looks like adults looking for work who are trying to create a resume and don't aren't able to fully evaluate the you know validity of the website they're using to do it.
4:01:57
Spend an hour or two hours inputting all of their work information only to get to the end of that website and be told they have to pay $10 for the PDF that they just spent all of that time entering their information for.
4:02:10
Because they couldn't look at it and say, oh no, not this one.
4:02:13
That's what school librarians teach.
4:02:15
They teach you how to evaluate information.
4:02:17
And what happens when we don't have them is that.
4:02:21
So the first step to addressing the school librarian shortage is determining the extent of the problem and I urge you to support intro 11/25 and require the DOE to provide this information so we can get people what they need to live their lives.
