The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Teaching Librarian 15.indd 30 Ontario School Library Association Almost every school in Ontario has a library, but, as we know, that doesn't always mean that there's someone behind the counter. Our thoughts about school library staffing are probably mixed. On the one hand, we're all aware that teacher-librarians and library technicians have been hard-hit by budget cutbacks over the past fifteen years. On the other hand, we--or some of us, at least--still have jobs. What is the actual situation? Who's really left in school libraries? To get a better picture of how Ontario's school libraries are actually staffed, I called every school board in the province over the 2006- 2007 school year. The results are not cause for celebration, but neither are they as apocalyptic as I had feared. Teacher-librarians and library technicians do still exist in Ontario's schools, though we could wish that they were more prominent. Some notes about the data. Firstly, School Authorities and First Nations schools are not included. Secondly, the Byzantine complexities of staffing have been reduced to a very simplistic "part-time," "full-time" or "mix of p/t and f/t." Thirdly, the numbers of teacher- librarian positions quoted include both part- time and full-time positions, and in at least two cases are approximations. It was difficult to gather exact data from some boards. Lastly, I am not a trained statistician, and my conclusions are therefore unquestionably open to dispute. Even with its limitations, this survey still provides more information about the school library staffing policies of individual boards than has been previously available. I hope that it will prove useful. Numbers Teacher-librarians are a threatened species perhaps, but they are definitely not extinct. As Table 1 shows, a healthy 74% of public school boards in Ontario still hire teacher-librarians in the secondary panel, though this drops to 57% in the case of the elementary panel. Catholic boards do not fare as well, with just over half of them using teacher-librarians in high schools, and fewer than a quarter of them placing teacher-librarians in elementary schools. There are 2778 teacher-librarian jobs in Ontario right now. This number includes both part-time and full-time positions, which makes it difficult to compare the number of teacher-librarians with the total number of teachers in the province, but it is safe to say that it is less than 1%. As a subgroup within Ontario's teachers, we barely register. Elementary teacher-librarian Anybody home? Who's really left in Ontario's school libraries? Public Boards Separate Boards Boards with Teacher- Librarians Percentage of Public Boards (%) Boards with Teacher- Librarians Percentage of Separate Boards (%) Elementary 20 57 8 22 Secondary 26 74 21 57 Table 1 Number of boards with teacher-librarians, by system and panel Table 2 Number of teacher-librarian positions (part- or full-time), by panel Teacher-Librarian Positions Elementary 2147 Secondary 631 Total 2778