Andrea Kneeland, a teacher librarian in her first year at Frick Impact Academy, had heard students at the middle school in East Oakland weren’t interested in reading.
The library, which had been closed for about a decade, reopened the year before Kneeland took the job of cataloging books and interacting with students.
Most students at the school were reading years below grade level, she learned. And some students couldn’t even grasp all the letters of the alphabet.
But within her first few months of restocking the shelves, Kneeland learned that Frick students were checking out more books than any other Oakland Unified School District middle school.
The school was filled with readers, after all.
“How can you know if you have readers or not if you are not exposing them to books that they want to read?” Kneeland said. “At least find some books that the kids like, so they don’t hate this thing that they’re also being told that they’re not good at.”
But it’s true: Oakland public school students aren’t very good at reading.
According to the Scholastic Reading Inventory, an assessment of reading performance, only 36.1 percent of students in the school district were reading at or above grade level in the spring of the 2016-17 academic year. And a whopping 40.8 percent of students were more than one year below grade level.
But Kari Hatch, the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Oakland Public School Libraries, says it’s not the students’ fault that they’re having trouble reading.
She believes students don’t do well on the reading assessment test, in part because many don’t have access to a school library.
I’m sharing this because studies show that school libraries impact student literacy, especially for students of color who come from disadvantaged neighborhoods. When there is an active library in their schools, those students perform better on standardized tests and are much more likely to graduate.
And for many of those students, Kneeland told me, the school library is the only place where they’ll have access to materials that enrich their learning experiences.
“Studies prove of anything you can put in a school, a school library is the single most effective thing at closing the achievement gap,” she said.
According to the school district, 24 of its 84 libraries are completely closed, which is about 28.5 percent of them. That number is disputed by Hatch, who said the number of closed libraries is closer to 40 percent. Many of the libraries considered open, Hatch said, aren’t staffed daily or staffed by librarians at all. And some don’t allow students to check out books.
To run a library, you need librarians, but California has the worst librarian-to-student ratio in the nation. There are about 8,000 students for every librarian in the state’s schools, a ratio that’s about eight times larger than the national average, according to the California School Boards Association.
And the gap has been steadily widening for two decades. In the 2000-01 academic year, there were 4,306 students for every librarian, according to the California Department of Education.
“The issue with libraries is indicative of a bigger problem in our state,” Oakland school board member Jody London told me. “There’s so many pressures on school districts that ... when we look at how do we spend our funds ... we have a lot of competing demands.”
We should be demanding that the school district spend money more wisely.
A University of Oregon study released last week found that the district had a net loss of $57.4 million in revenue last school year, because 15,500 students chose to attend one of the city’s 40 charter schools.
My colleague Jill Tucker pointed out that Oakland Unified’s enrollment has significantly declined over the past two decades. It has 37,000 students this year, down from 54,000 in 2000. But district officials have not closed many schools to address the lower enrollment, saying it’s not an effective way to save money.
So keeping schools with low enrollment open while keeping libraries shuttered in schools with high enrollment is an effective way to educate?
“The schools that have highly qualified libraries and librarians, those children benefit from the parents that understand how important it is to have a library in their school,” Hatch said. “But if it’s not the parents that are making that happen, historically, it’s not really happened in Oakland.”
The school district told me libraries are a high priority, and that even as budget cuts have been made in other areas, the district will maintain current library staffing.
“It’s true that this funding is not adequate to have open libraries in every school, open all week,” said John Sasaki, a spokesman for Oakland Unified. “That’s the work in front of us. Figuring out how to, along with our community, raise the funds necessary to open and fully staff all libraries in our schools.”
Lisa Hobbs is a librarian at Crocker Highlands Elementary School. The library wouldn’t be open if the school’s Parent Teacher Association didn’t pay Hobbs’ salary.
“It’s really telling that the communities in Oakland that have strong parent communities and have resources, they have libraries,” she said. “And the parents in the communities don’t consider it to be an extra. It’s something that they feel like is essential for their kids’ well-being.”
What about schools without parents with extra money to pay for a school librarian? Are they supposed to accept the learning and achievement gap?
Last year, a citizens oversight committee recommended a change in the funding school district libraries receive from Measure G, a 2008 parcel tax. Measure G amounts to an additional $20 million each year in the school district’s budget, but the money is earmarked for seven broad categories, including “to maintain school libraries.”
The libraries, though, have usually been kept at the end of the waiting list.
In the 2014-15 academic year, only $86,952 was allotted for school libraries. In 2015-16, the allotment rose to $121,000. That year, though, the oversight committee found that none of the money was actually spent on maintaining school libraries. The Measure G allotment jumped to $1.2 million in 2016-17, but that was about $200,000 shy of what it was in 2013-14.
“Our Measure G oversight committee has recommended that we put some guidelines in place and think about how we want to direct the funds,” London said.
If the district wants to open some of the school libraries that are closed, that’s a good place to start. But it’s still short of the kind of commitment to libraries that Hatch of the Friends of the Oakland Public School Libraries is seeking.
“We have not made libraries part of our literacy program,” Hatch said. “Why not?”
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: email@example.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr