Educators and community members urge Sweetwater board to preserve librarians and counselors amid staffing concerns

Several educators and community members used the board’s public-comment period to press the Sweetwater Union High School District Board of Trustees to preserve librarian and counselor staffing during budget planning.

"Teachers still need research support," said Trevor Angood, identifying himself as a teacher and Sweetwater Educators Association executive-board member speaking in his individual capacity. Angood warned that part-time librarian positions mean instructional support shifts back into unpaid classroom time and urged sites to support full staffing if libraries are to operate as staffed instructional spaces.

Adrienne Marriott, a librarian at Bonita Vista High School, said decades of research link fully staffed school libraries with stronger student outcomes and called libraries "the welcoming heart of the school." Marriott described library services — information literacy, database research instruction and circulation — and said reduced librarian FTEs would limit those supports.

Hilltop High librarian Lourdes Renteria invited trustees to visit school libraries to see services in action, noting libraries teach information, media and research literacy and provide inclusive, free spaces for students. Lizabeth Lewin Singh Garcia, president of the Sweetwater Counseling and Guidance Association, told the board counselors are concerned about increased site assignments and fragmented services caused by declining enrollment and asked for collaborative solutions to retain counseling capacity.

Union and association leaders framed the staffing discussion as a continuity and student-success issue. "This is not an expansion request. It is a continuity request," Angood said, urging trustees and site administrators to use in-ratio allocations to backfill librarian FTEs to 1.0 where needed.

Board members acknowledged the comments. No formal votes were taken on staffing during the public-comment period; several later consent and bargaining items passed at the meeting related to administrator and counselor agreements. Speakers requested follow-up visits to libraries and further discussion during budget and staffing processes.

Key claims made during public comment included that fully staffed librarians improve student performance on standardized measures (as argued by Marriott) and that holding FTEs at sites can lock temporary teachers into prolonged provisional status (as described by Lucy Ugarte, president of the Sweetwater Education Association). The board did not rebut those claims on the record during public comment.