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When school starts this fall in the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District near San Antonio, none of the district’s 15 campus libraries will be operated by a certified librarian.
As a cost-saving measure, SCUC’s libraries will be staffed by hourly workers known as paraprofessionals who are not required to have a college degree.
Decisions about what books should be purchased for the libraries will be made by a central office administrator who is not a certified librarian either.
“We are not expecting a paraprofessional to replace what a master’s degree librarian is able to do, but we are trying to make sure that we're good stewards of the district's money,” said Kelly Kovacs, the district’s assistant superintendent of schools in an interview with Texas Public Radio.
Kovacs said SCUC’s librarians have been offered teaching positions with the district in schools where there were vacancies.
“Nobody’s lost their job,” Kovacs said. “Our libraries will still be open. Students will still be able to check out books and learn about different literature; research.”
Certified school librarians in Texas are required to have a master’s degree and two years of experience teaching in a classroom.
The recommendation to replace librarians with paras comes from a committee of district employees and community members tasked with finding ways to save the district money.
Brian Moy, SCUC’s chief financial officer, said the package of cost reductions will save the district about $6 million, cutting the district’s nearly $12 million budget deficit in half.
“This decision, nor any of the decisions that make up the $6 million is easy. We wish we had the funding to do everything we want. I think one thing that this committee came away with is that SCUC doesn't have a lot of fluff,” Moy said. “There are only 30 districts in the state that receive less money per student than we do. We didn't have the money to have fluff in the first place.”
Texas allocates funding per student based on student demographics and the size of the school district.
Moy said the change in library staffing will save the district about $450,000.
“We had a couple of (librarian) vacancies, so of the nine positions that we had with librarians in them, that's about $700,000. The replacement with paraprofessionals is about $250,000,” Moy said.
SCUC had 11 librarian positions for the 2025-2026 school year, with four librarians split between the district’s eight elementary schools.
Christie Yowell previously worked as a librarian at SCUC. She said she left the district and took a job at nearby Judson ISD after juggling two school libraries during the 2023-2024 school year.
“As a librarian, you really need to get to know the community and the collection, and to double that work changes the job of librarian,” Yowell said.
Judson ISD also considered cutting librarian positions last year but ultimately decided against it. This year, Judson closed four schools and cut hundreds of positions in order to balance their deficit. But because Judson reduced staffing more generally, the district was able to avoid cutting librarians entirely.
“I was concerned that Judson was going to eliminate the library program as well, because of the budget troubles, but they found a way to keep it,” Yowell said. “Judson found a way to keep the program, it's not ideal in its model, but at least they found a way. They didn't want to lose the program entirely.”
Austin ISD is facing pushback after announcing last month that it would cut some librarian positions to reduce its own budget deficit. Austin ISD’s plan, however, is much more limited than SCUC’s. Small Austin ISD schools will share a librarian with another campus.
SCUC, meanwhile, will have no certified librarians working as librarians anywhere in the district.
Instead, district administrators will provide paras hired to run their school libraries with two days of training in July and further training during the school year.
“We're fortunate that we have built into our calendar two days where the paraprofessionals come in earlier than the teachers, and so our literacy coordinator and our library services coordinator are going to work with the paraprofessionals on those two days to get them the training, and then we're going to build in opportunities throughout the school year as well to touch base with them,” said Serena Georges-Penny, SCUC’s executive director of curriculum and professional development.
Georges-Penny said teachers will continue to drop off their students at the library as part of the specials rotation in elementary school through sixth grade, and libraries will remain open for research and book checkout for junior high and high school students.
“They'll still be reading to students in the library, showing them how to check out books, showing them like how to be good stewards of media and information,” Georges-Penny said.
Georges-Penny also said SCUC’s library services coordinator would use a software program called Destiny to manage the library collections at all of the campus libraries.
“Destiny is great in the fact that it tells you what books need to be weeded from the library, and so you essentially just pull a list, and Destiny will tell you, OK these books right now need to be weeded from the library,” Georges-Penny said. “And so, she'll be running those reports for the paraprofessionals and letting them know which books need to be weeded from the library and then letting them know which books need to be purchased at the campus level.”
Georges-Penny said SCUC’s library services coordinator is also the district’s social studies coordinator and does not have a degree in library services.
“She's very familiar with the research component and library requirements. She studies Senate Bill 13 like nobody's business,” George-Penny said, referring to the new state law requiring school boards to approve new book purchases.
Yowell, however, worries that students will suffer without trained librarians in their school libraries.
“The research skills, all of that will suffer, the critical thinking, all of the different things that the librarian teaches; that will suffer,” Yowell said.
Yowell said librarians serve an important role in teaching students how to sift through information and find accurate sources.
“It's only going to become more difficult with AI, with the vast amount of information out there. It's only going to become more difficult for our students to find their way through all of the information, and that's really what our job is,” Yowell said. “To provide information to the students, show them how to use the information, show them how to sift through it to enrich their lives, whether it be for academic purposes or just to fill their hearts and their brains with what they want to fill it with.”
Yowell said librarians are also trained in how to manage library collections, both to follow SB 13 and to meet the developmental needs and interests of students.
“I think that sometimes people can, if they're not trained, if they don't know as much information, they may not choose new books, they may choose what's already in the system in order to make their lives easier,” Yowell said. “We need librarians to do that hard work.”
SCUC ISD is located in both Bexar and Guadalupe counties, with the majority of the district in Guadalupe County. About 14,800 students were enrolled in the district in the 2025-2026 school year.
