Superintendent says district has already made the cuts, and more are on the way due to declining enrollment

By Holly Dillemuth, Ashland.news

An Ashland School District employee has started a petition opposing cuts to full-time, in-person librarian positions at Ashland Middle School and Ashland High School that will be eliminated this fall.

Currently, the Ashland High librarian position has been kept vacant since the departure of librarian Aimee Cork earlier this year. The Ashland Middle School librarian position is part-time and staffed by Karl Pryor. Pryor came out of retirement to temporarily work part-time in the role. 

The 1.5 positions represent about $180,000 to the district, which is grappling with about $2.4 million shortfall this year and $2.5 million shortfall next year, a total approximate 12% cut to the approximate $40 million budget. Already, the district has cut the equivalent of about 17 classified staff, and Ashland Superintendent Samuel Bogdanove told Ashland.news on Monday there will be more reductions and/or cuts over the course of the next two years.

The plan is currently to contract for librarian services through Southern Oregon Education Service District, Bogdanove said. 

SOESD provides licensed school librarians throughout the region.

“They’ll come to the site a couple of times per year, directly in person to check in and the remainder of that time can connect with library media techs remotely,” Bogdanove said. 

In the meantime, classified library staff will assist students in the library and utilize additional library resources as needed from a remote librarian.

Matt Damon, who serves as a math specialist at Bellview Elementary and serves eight hours per week managing elementary libraries at three of Ashland’s five elementary schools, opposes this idea and created the petition. Damon has been with the district for more than 20 years, eight of which he spent as an elementary teacher prior to serving as an elementary librarian.

Damon met with Ashland.news on Monday at Bellview Elementary in the school’s library.

He has a front row seat to the impact of libraries and the impact of cuts therein, and he spoke to school board members on April 11 about his opposition to the cuts.

He started the petition on April 18 in an effort to overturn the decision, or at least to show how the community feels about it now that it’s been made. As of Tuesday evening, 407 people had signed the petition on Change.org. (To view the petition, click here.)

“My aim is to gain enough voices from the community to have the district reconsider the cuts,” Damon said.

“We’ve invested so much in the spaces,” Damon said. “It would be like building a sports facility and not having coaches.”

He noted that the library at Ashland Middle School is new but will not have an in-person librarian as of this fall. 

“Kids don’t naturally know how to use a library — They need to be taught,” he said. “Libraries don’t happen without a librarian. They’re not storage areas, they’re learning spaces.”

Some weeks, Damon can spend 12 hours going through the collections of books in each of the three elementary libraries to ensure they have relevant content, that they are free or racial or gender bias, and to see if they have been checked out in the last five years. It’s a process known as “weeding” and is on the not-so-short list of things to do for librarians.

Librarians — mostly at the middle and high school level — are also on hand to offer guidance to teachers. Teachers will work directly with a librarian on staff to pull certain books for specific research projects. Librarians will host students at the library to teach them research tools as well.

“Teachers obviously are trained to do all kinds of things, but as far as research goes, librarians know about particular databases,” Damon said.

“We’re also trained to help kids learn what’s a trustworthy source,” he added. “We live in the age of information and we’re basically saying, we’re just going to have a building full of books with some people that are able to help kids check books in and out.”

Damon emphasized that classified librarian staff do much more than that, but that they are not trained as librarians in information literacy and how to curate a collection of books.

When asked about a petition that’s been formed, Bogdanove said the district always aims to listen to its families and parents, but he emphasized what is at stake in light of declining enrollment that isn’t going away anytime soon, according to projections.

He emphasized the important role that librarians play in schools for students and staff, as well as the tough choices that the district faces in light of declining enrollment.

“The challenge here is we’re talking about replacing basically 1.5 librarians, then we have to ask the question, OK, what can we cut?” Bogdanove said. “Do we increase class size at the elementary (schools), do we impact music or arts programs? Do we impact world language programs or other electives? And all of these are tough choices. The other piece that we have to factor in is this is just the beginning of our work. We have additional work to do over the next two years.”

“We will be reducing personnel over the next couple of years and we want to do that in a way that’s really smart and impactful,” he added. “My hope is at some point we can bring back librarians, or more librarian time than we are planning, but that has to be part of a broader discussion.”

It is not yet clear what positions or areas of the budget could be impacted in these potential future cuts.

What’s behind all of the cuts and reductions?

Bogdanove said there are a few different factors impacting a decline in enrollment, which are prompting the cuts.

“The biggest factor is, there used to be a statute that allowed people to enroll in the district, it was called open enrollment from any other district,” Bogdanove told Ashland.news at his district office on Monday. “That ended in 2018 and 2019, so all of the students that were allowed in the district at that point in time were slowly graduating out … that’s about a planned reduction of about 300 students.”

Bogdanove believes COVID-19 had an impact as well as the Almeda Fire.

“Frankly, the cost of housing and the cost of living in Ashland has had an impact,” he said. “So in 2022, we actually went out and had a demographic study done to update that.”

The 10-year study, which is available at the website, projected high, middle, and a low range of enrollment. The data was based on birth rate trends, property sales, and housing development.

“So far we’ve been tracking exactly along the middle path, which predicts a loss of about another 140 students over the next three or so years,” Bogdanove said. 

The losses total about 440 students including the 300 mentioned above.

“I think predicting enrollment past five years out, particularly out of COVID, is really challenging because there’s so much that’s unknown,” Bogdanove said. “The most reliable numbers are (year) one through five (of the study).”

Bogdanove said while budgeting is not always a straightforward process, he said it’s a thoughtful one that has gone into the decision to cut the librarian positions.

“We’ve worked to create a budget that really staffs our schools well within the resources that we’ve got,” Bogdanove said. “We’re in a position now where if we add something back into the budget, we have to determine what we would cut and after the thought and effort that’s gone into it, I think it’s not likely we would shift for the coming year.”

Keeping class sizes small is Bogdanove’s goal and helped him decide where to cut.

“One of the consistent messages that we’ve gotten over the years from teachers and families is class size, and that’s a lot of what we go with,” Bogdanove said.

He emphasized it’s important to look at the status of librarians on a regional level.

“I think when people hear ‘cut librarians’ they anticipate the worst,” Bogdanove said. “In reality, we’ve got two very, very capable classified folk(s) working both the middle and the high school who are doing an amazing job. The idea is to give them the license support and oversight they need to continue that work. It’s a model that you’ll find at most districts in the region.”

Bogdanove acknowledged that the classified library staff members are not trained as librarians, however.

When asked how the school board is involved with that decision, Bogdanove shared that while the board votes on the budget, it doesn’t piece through the budget to approve or not approve line items.

“That’s really the job of the administration to propose those in places in the budget,” Bogdanove said. “That said, the board does set the vision for the district. If the board were to say, we want different priorities, we want X-Y-Z, then we would align our budget accordingly to that.” 

The district has a strategic plan that identifies goals created through a stakeholder process that involves board members, teachers, students, several community members. The plan helps the district set goals, and Bogdanove said the district works to align the budget to help meet those goals.

“And that’s really what we’ve done here,” Bogdanove said. “They (School board members) hold the vision … but they aren’t going to vote on (funding) librarians.”

Update: The petition had more than 500 signatures on it when sent to district school board members and the superintendent Thursday morning, April 25, as a report on “the current status” of the petition, according to Damon. “I hope there is a possibility that current staff reduction proposals can be discussed and reconsidered,” Damon wrote in a note accompanying the petition. Signatures are still being collected.

Reach Ashland.news staff reporter Holly Dillemuth at hollyd@ashland.news.

Related stories:

School district employees lament loss of in-person librarian services this fall (April 21, 2024)

Ashland School Board cuts at least $1.3 million from budget, including athletic director and up to two dozen classified staffers (Feb. 12, 2024)