Volumes of Volunteers : Education: Budget constraints have forced more and more school systems to rely on parents and other non-professionals to staff their libraries.

To children at Murphy Ranch Elementary in Whittier, Chris Laurich is every inch a school librarian. She orders, checks out and shelves books, sends out overdue notices, and reads to visiting classes.

But she is not a librarian. She’s a parent. And she gets paid nothing for the 50 hours a month she works. She is among a small army of parent volunteers staffing libraries in school districts throughout Southeast Los Angeles County.

To cut costs, most school systems have transformed their librarians into classroom teachers and replaced them with volunteers or clerks. Many officials insist that their low-budget libraries work well and that schools have little alternative in these tight economic times.

Many librarians and teachers, however, call the cuts damaging to student reading and study skills at a time when school officials say they want to stress improvement in student achievement and encourage a love of books.

“Parents perform a very valuable service in all our libraries, and we really depend on them for a great deal of assistance,” said Virginia Kalb, coordinator of media services for the Montebello Unified School District. “But to put major responsibilities for providing library service on a group of volunteer folks, no matter how dedicated they are, leaves a lot of room for disappointment.”

Before this year, Montebello schools had one of the most fully staffed library systems in the state. An ongoing budget crisis prompted officials last year to make classroom teachers of its 17 elementary school librarians. Come July 1, the rest of the district’s librarians will join them. Administrators expect to replace the librarians with part-time clerks.

Bellflower Unified also will replace librarians with clerks next year. And Long Beach Unified will reduce the number of librarians by attrition for the second year in a row. The growing district lost three elementary librarians to retirement last year, leaving 31 full-time positions for 57 elementary schools.

Other districts that recently reduced library services include ABC Unified, East Whittier City, Los Nietos and Whittier City. No area districts have anything close to one librarian per school, the minimum recommended by the American Assn. of School Librarians.

School libraries across the country are understaffed, and California schools have been particularly so, said Don Adcock, an administrator with the school librarians association. And the situation is getting worse.

“We haven’t found any place reporting the kind of cuts and the conditions we’re hearing about in California,” Adcock said.

School systems have not only cut staff members, but they have canceled subscriptions, reduced book purchases and limited the hours when students may use libraries.

At Granada Middle School in Whittier, one parent said her daughter’s class goes to the library only about once a year. Granada depends on a part-time clerk who opens the library three days a week. Assistant Principal Melody Schubert said the school nonetheless tries to make the library available for any student who wants to use it. Administrators have distributed many books to individual teachers to make the literature more available and trips to the library less necessary.

In Montebello, one elementary school has gone from 12 magazine subscriptions to none. Canceled magazines include Ranger Rick, National Geographic, Current History, the New Republic and Science. The district’s book-buying budget was cut 55% this year.

But even that amounts to a larger book budget than in some districts, which rely entirely on PTA and other contributions for purchases. The collections in some schools are decades out of date, particularly in science and social studies. Some librarians said they still circulate science books that merely envision man’s first trip to the moon. Many atlases have not caught up with the European withdrawal from Africa, let alone the rapid changes in the former Soviet Union.

“We’re trying to update,” Montebello library coordinator Kalb said. “But when we take out those old, outdated atlases from 1960, which show Rhodesia and the Republic of the Congo, how are we going to replace those materials?”

School librarians use their diminishing funds to try to update their technology as well as their collections. Resources available to libraries include word processors, electronic encyclopedias, video games to teach geography, hundreds of years worth of newspapers on microfilm and databanks of continually updated world events. Librarians in most area districts attempt to update their collections in several languages to match their student populations. They also seek to include books for a wider range of reading levels.

Millions of dollars worth of grants and free books and equipment are available to schools with librarians who know how to obtain them.

By all accounts, Chris Laurich and the 12 other volunteers who run the Murphy Ranch library work hard and well. Laurich combs through catalogues of award-winning books to scout potential purchases, schedules library time for each class every week and directs schoolwide reading contests.

“The only place where I feel inadequate is when students ask for a book to do research,” Laurich said. “I can’t buy it. The money isn’t there.”

This year the PTA contributed $750 for books, which buys about a shelf of hardbacks. Because of staff cuts, Laurich no longer has help from a part-time district librarian to make file cards, choose book purchases and decide what to remove from circulation.

“Our nonfiction section is becoming obsolete,” Laurich said. “Kids need books with brighter covers. Plain covers used to be all right, but the bright ones are the ones they check out. Some of these books are 30 years old or older.”

By March, the library account was empty, but Laurich wanted to continue awarding stickers to avid readers. Her solution was to buy the stickers herself. Another volunteer donated an electric typewriter to replace one that expired.

Murphy Ranch has always had parents who are prosperous professionals, willing and able to volunteer. But fewer have been available recently. The Murphy Ranch library is open only 17 hours a week. Nearly all of that time has to be used for class visits, so individual students have little chance to come in on their own.

At a time when schools need parents more than ever because of tight budgets, families are also facing a budget pinch that makes many less able to help.

“I’m slowly losing them,” Laurich said of her volunteers. “With more and more parents working, there are less and less parents willing and able to help.”

The setup at Murphy Ranch remains miles ahead of some schools. Not every school has an active PTA. In many schools, most parents have jobs or child-rearing duties that prevent them from volunteering. Many parents do not speak English.

Even so, Whittier-area Principal Laurie Eastwood said that the volunteer system can work well, and that schools have little choice but to make it work.

“I think the key to the future is going to be to have the parents and the school working together,” said Eastwood, who set up the volunteer library at Murphy Ranch before becoming principal at Laurel Elementary.

“People are very resourceful. If parents realize that reading is the most important thing that happens at an elementary school, then they’ll buy into it.”

Community correspondent Connie Simonian contributed to this story.