‘Students are going to suffer.’ Pasco librarians wary of rumored staffing cuts
Pasco school librarians and clerks are on edge this summer after some were notified that their positions could be eliminated for the 2025-26 school year.
The Pasco School District budget writers expect to present a nearly finished budget to the school board in two weeks and some of the district librarians are worried they could be the first positions to be eliminated.
“It is going to be physically impossible for one person to take care of the size of our libraries,” Chiawana High librarian Judy Hatchett told the school board at a recent meeting.
“People are going to suffer — our students are going to suffer, our staff are going to suffer. It’s just not physically possible for me to be in two or three places at one time.”
Hatchett says she’s had two “wonderful, highly qualified” clerks to help her at Chiawana High School.
Together, the three serve 3,100 students who attend Washington state’s largest public high school.
But she says her two assistants are at risk of being cut and she won’t be able to do classes, offer orientation and help students with their laptops.
“These people barely make $40,000 a year. That’s not a way to balance our budget,” Hatchett argued.
It’s unclear however how many library jobs could be on the chopping block.
People who spoke at the June board meeting spoke about their concerns for librarian positions at Pasco High School and at Stevens Middle School.
But Anna Tensmeyer, the district’s director of public affairs, told the Herald there have been no layoffs and that the district has not yet decided on librarian staffing for next school year.
“We are currently engaged in a collaborative process to assess staffing levels, instructional needs and budget constraints. This includes evaluating current vacancies and carefully considering input from staff, including librarians and library clerks,” she wrote in a statement.
Pasco is working to adjust spending to make up for a drop in revenue from various sources, including rapidly rising costs and stagnant state investments.
It recently took money from reserve funds to patch a $7 million gap so it could finish this school year with a balanced budget. Then, it expected to continue cutting expenses and vacant positions to save another $12 million to 15 million over the next three years.
The district is also coming to terms with an era of declining student enrollment after several decades of blistering growth.
Enrollment is important because it is directly tied to money the state pays school districts for each student who enrolls. Pasco serves more than 17,400 full-time students.
The Richland School District also has been wrestling with cutting its budget for this fall.
Five full-time nurses and six administrative assistants were laid off in Richland and won’t return for the 2025-26 school year. And the board also reassigned five secondary school librarians to fill teaching positions and paraeducators will manage library operations.
School librarians
In Washington state, school librarians are a core part of student education. They are certificated teachers who serve as media specialists to help students access information and often organize and host programs.
Clerks support librarians with that work by assisting with library operations and helping students.
Stephanie Post, Virgie Robinson Elementary’s librarian, said at the June board meeting that research shows average test scores of impoverished, Latino and Black students are higher in states that invest in libraries.
There’s also an access gap between poorer, more-rural, racially diverse schools and urban, richer schools.
“I teach in a school where the majority are Spanish speakers. It’s unnerving to think that they will lose academic advancement because of a lack of librarians,” Post said.
“A 2015 Washington state study found that one key factor distinguishing high-performing, high-poverty schools from low-performing, high-poverty schools is a quality librarian program,” she continued.
Angela Matson, a librarian at Franklin STEM Elementary, told the board that librarians help both students and teachers to become better digital citizens and critical 21st century consumers of media.
At a time when teenagers are spending more of their time on social media and getting most of their local and world information from online sources — some questionable due to the rise of AI-generated videos and pictures — now is “not the time to cut the staff or programs,” she argued.
A previous version of this story misidentified the name and title of Angela Matson.
This story was originally published July 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
