Ah Jeez, Larry

This article is prompted by a letter to the editor in today’s London Free Press, but I have to go back some for it all to make sense.

First, you will recall the 10,000 book purge at the Beal Secondary School library, which I wrote about here, back in early January. Still angry as hell about that.

The hero of that appalling story was one Larry Farquharson, who was the teacher-librarian at Beal who raised a stink about the purge, else we would not have heard about it at all. He got suspended for ‘insubordination’ for that, and eventually resigned his position.

Some time after that, a story appeared in the London Freeps on January 29 titled;

School board using vice-principals to fill library roles amid deficit: Union

A secondary teachers’ union leader says the assignments could reduce support for students and staff

That sub-title gives you the entire jist of the article. TVDSB ran a big deficit, they are now in receivership, being run by an appointee of the provincial education ministry, and that has resulted in some vice principals being give some teaching or librarian duties for part of their day as a way to save money.

Here’s what John Bernans, a local leader with the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, had to say about all this to the Freeps:

“As a result, vice-principals have been assigned some teaching responsibilities,” Bernans said. “At some schools, they have been assigned to teacher-librarian jobs for part of the day.

“We asked that they be assigned to areas where they are qualified, but the board did not do that in all cases.”

Without appropriate qualifications, vice-principals are “not adequately trained to meet the needs of students and staff within the library,” he said.

“Because their responsibilities are divided across multiple areas, their capacity to assist staff in managing student behaviour is greatly diminished,” Bernans said. “In situations where urgent matters demand the vice-principal’s immediate attention, the library may even be forced to close.”

Library closed? Oh, Dear. We can at least console ourselves with the fact that many of those libraries have many many fewer books which students will not be able to access for a day.

I did not pay much attention to this article, it is full of the usual featherbedding stuff one hears from all unions. God forbid a vice-principal (what exactly do they do?) be put in the library for a while. They are not ‘qualified’ to be there. I admit to being ignorant of the deep and difficult qualifications needed to be a school librarian. Some familiarity with the particular library’s resources would surely be helpful. No way a mere vice-principal could acquire that, though….

Well, now that the letter in the Freeps (about which more below) brought this back to my attention, I have read the entire Jan 29 article, only to be very surprised to find this quote in it:

Larry Farquharson was the teacher-librarian at H.B. Beal secondary school until he resigned following last year’s removal of about 10,000 books from the library.

Using unqualified staff in school libraries is an insult to trained teacher-librarians and to students, who have “the absolute right” to access qualified teachers, Farquharson said.

“Teacher-librarians often invest significant extra time and effort to engage with and supervise students – many keeping the library open and accessible outside their assigned contractual duties,” he said.

Oh. My. God.

Larry.

He is parroting the union line. A union that could/would not protect him from getting suspended for insubordination, and he is on their side in this.

There is more. Larry doubles down. The letter in the Freeps today which I mentioned above is captioned ‘Demand Credentials’ and is signed ‘Larry Farquharson, London’.

In it Mr. F says this about putting ‘non-qualified’ vice principals in the library.

This practice undermines the legitimacy of qualifications and the requirement that a qualified individual be placed in a particular teaching (or administrative) position.

Parents and students must demand that vice-principals be assigned classroom instructional and co-instructional roles for which that are appropriately and legitimately professionally qualified, without exception.

Yes. Professional qualifications, indeed. Credentials. ‘Legitimacy’, even. Once a union guy always a union guy, I suppose.

I worked in one institution that provides those ‘credentials’ for teachers and librarians for 42 years. The so-called School of Education was probably the outfit at UWO that had the lowest academic standards in the whole place. Hell, when I was an undergrad in the 70s at BGSU, everyone knew that every student in the Faculty of Education had an A average. The teacher teachers got grade inflation going way before everyone else, which is pretty much how it took hold throughout the whole now-rotten system.

To be fair, if you want an MA or PhD in ‘Library and Information Science’ from UWO you go to the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. FIMS. It ends in ‘Studies’ – there is no more to be said than that.

From Hero to (Retired) Featherbedding Credentialist. Once again, the world disappoints me.