Every day, over 600 students walk in and out of the library seeking research help, book recommendations and a quiet place to study. Behind the scenes, librarians manage everything from teaching lessons to helping students find their next read.
The town administration announced potential staffing cuts during the Feb. 12 School Committee meeting in response to the $5.3 million budget reductions for fiscal year 2027, including a cut of one of the four high school librarians. At the meeting, members of the Student Library Advisory (SLA), a club at the high school, displayed the 700 signatures they collected to object to the proposal. After discussion of where and how to act on the deficit, committee members ultimately passed the proposal to cut a librarian position, with an official announcement pending.
The decision to cut a librarian comes during a time of many cuts across Brookline Public Schools, including the elimination of 210 staff positions, roughly around 14.5 percent of the workforce. Committee Member Mariah Nobrega said during the Feb. 12 meeting that with the large deficit, there is no “wiggle room” for extra funding around these difficult choices.
“Any of the decisions that we made around staffing cuts were not made easily, and they were made in collaboration as a team with our principals, as a leadership team,” Nobrega said.
According to librarian Shelley Mains, who has worked at the high school for 15 years, the announcement for library staffing cuts was hard to hear, but she said she understands the pressure the administration faces.
“It’s true of many teachers: every time there’s budget cuts, you worry that the thing you care about the most will be cut. So it was kind of a confirmation of my worst fear,” Mains said. “The superintendent and her team had a really difficult job ahead of them because they inherited a budget mess and not enough money coming in to cover everything we do. But also, we have a sense that people don’t understand everything the librarians do, and that this was an example of that.”
Mains said the librarians play a large role in educating students on literature, explaining research citations to classes and spreading the joy of reading, so this reduction may affect how much they are able to do.
“Everyone in the community wants to see more young people reading. All of the projects we do to encourage that, whether it’s the reading challenge or book clubs, require time and planning and meeting,” Mains said. “That’s something else that we will just have 33 percent less effort to put into.”
Senior Audrey Chang has been volunteering in the library for the past two years. She said she joined the SLA to become more involved with the library community and to help the school’s three librarians in the main building, who she said already have a large workload.
“I’ve seen how much the librarians do on a daily basis, and a lot of it is what other people don’t see,” Chang said. “When I heard about the potential cut, it felt very unfair because the librarians are already so overworked that getting rid of one is going to make the situation a lot worse in the future.”
According to senior Aditya Kaushik, one of the four founders of the SLA, the freshman building’s library is managed only by ninth grade librarian Maura McGill, meaning that when she’s teaching a lesson, eating lunch or taking a break, the library has to close. Kaushik said this experience exemplifies how understaffing directly affects students.
“[It] restricts access to a bunch of useful resources for a bunch of kids in the freshman library,” Kaushik said. “Now, if the librarian is cut, we were concerned that the same thing would happen [in the main library].”
Chang said that she was angry after the library staffing cut proposal was approved because she felt that the school committee had ignored the mass collection of signatures and the support for the petition.
“It was frustrating because you would think that with so much support for the librarians, they would reconsider,” Chang said. “It kind of feels disrespectful that they think it’s still okay to cut a position that’s so integral to the community when so many people are opposed to it.”
According to Mains, some students signed the petition and returned it to the library, where they told the librarians their opinions on the matter. Mains said she appreciated how the petition gave voice to students who want the librarians to stay.
“What touches me is students who say [the library] is their safe place. This is a place where they can come and feel like it’s okay to be who they are, and that in such a big school, there isn’t another place where they feel like it’s safe and comfortable and they belong,” Mains said. “That means a lot.”
