Austin Independent School District library clerk jobs are at risk of being cut starting in the upcoming 2025-26 school year. The district currently faces a $100 million-plus budget deficit that district leaders are working to close. The board will vote on a budget including these cuts on June 26, and if the budget is approved, it will take effect July 1.

The decision to include the termination of library clerk jobs district-wide would lead to McCallum losing its own library clerk, Lauren Alindogen. Alindogen started working at the school in November of 2021. The library clerk position at McCallum has been around for over 20 years.

Two other positions at Mac will be cut next year, including the Delta teachers’ aide and Fine Arts Academy clerk. Principal Andy Baxa was able to move Tonya Moore, the current Fine Arts Academy clerk to another position, but was unfortunately not able to do that for the library clerk or teacher aid. 

“They’re looking at trying to erase and get back on top of that budget deficit,” principal Andy Baxa said. “One way that they were trying to do that was by cutting positions. They’ve tried their best not to cut anything that will impact a campus, but unfortunately, they have to next year. They’ve stayed committed to maintaining things for teachers like two conference periods, but they had to cut something.”

Baxa described the efforts to decrease the district’s budget deficit as a balance in deciding what to cut and what to keep.

“We cut those positions, but we maintained that additional conference period for teachers, which is huge for our teacher morale and our district this year,” he said. “Teachers who teach seven out of eight feel more stressed and have less time.”

Although some positions were cut, Baxa is grateful that the librarian job is not at risk.

“I appreciate that they’re keeping a full-time librarian because Mr. Zuniga brings so much to our campus, not just with his knowledge of books and research but also with the way he approaches his students and maintains the vision of the library that was started by the librarian before him,” Baxa said. “He has embraced the community center approach and started to add his own spin to it as well.”

One of Baxa’s biggest concerns about losing the library clerk is that the current librarian, Mathew Zuniga, will not have extra help with device management and will have difficulty juggling the various aspects of the library.

“The technology department is working more proactively to provide support and change our procedures on device management to try and streamline it a little bit more,” he said. “We have to help support Mr. Z.”

Alindogen hoped that when they moved on from this position, they could have trained the next clerk on how to keep things running.

“I really wish that I could hand off my duties to the next me instead of making Matt do all of the things for a campus that is over-enrolled and still has raccoons in the ceiling,” they said.

Alindogen first suspected that their job may no longer be funded when they observed that the staff’s monthly newsletter mentioned that staffing costs are the highest in the budget.

“To my current knowledge, it sounds like the district had no good cuts to make,” they said. “There was no way to make the math work other than to cut positions.”

Alindogen noted the large role that Texas’s low student allotment and recapture have on districts’ ability to fund schools without being in situations where they have to cut jobs like theirs.

Austin ISD’s estimated recapture payment is $821 million. This reflects a nearly 400 percent increase in recapture when compared to payment made in 2014-15.

From 2000 to 2025, AISD will have paid the state of Texas approximately $8.3 billion.

In Alindogen’s opinion, having to cut jobs like the library clerk position will harm teachers’ well-being as well as librarians’.

“It’s going to put strain on teachers to do even more, and they already do a lot. [Not having a clerk] would impact our ability to take things off their plate and work together,” they said. “It’s hard to be a teacher, and it’s even harder when your campus support is being taken away.”

Alindogen also feels like students will be directly harmed by the removal of their position.

“I feel bad for students,” Alindogen said. “Next year, students will wonder why the library isn’t open or why we won’t have the cool programming stuff we had last year. It’s not fair to you guys either.”

Alindogen worries that the library will no longer be able to offer things like clubs, opening the prayer room after lunch for the Islamic Dhuhr prayer, the arts and crafts station, the gender-neutral bathrooms and research seminars.

“A lot of the things we have done together can not be feasibly maintained by one person,” Alindogen said. “It is making us make a lot of hard choices.”

Jain Orr, who served as McCallum’s librarian for multiple years before Zuniga took over this year, helped start some of the programs that may have to shut down next year. These cuts frustrate Orr because she saw how much they increased student presence in the library.

“I tried to make the library an indispensable part of the school community and really drum up engagement and foot traffic and make this the most useful possible resource so that they couldn’t cut us,” Orr said. “So to see this happen anyway without any kind of regard to what’s going on in this space feels cruel.”

Additionally, Orr is sad that the library won’t be able to be open all day and before and after school next year with only one librarian. She feels like this will harm students who rely on using that space before and after school.

“I would just say that librarians help students who are the most vulnerable and that’s what these cuts are gonna hurt the most,” Orr said.

Junior Elise Garza fears that many students will be negatively impacted by a decrease in the scale of the arts and crafts station, which Alindogen started.

“This is kind of the arts space that everyone in this school has access to,” Garza said. “I think it’s had a really big impact on creating community within McCallum and creating a safe space for people to enjoy themselves.”

Having seen Alindogen’s positive mark on McCallum with the programs they started, Garza feels that AISD’s removal of their position is unfair and doesn’t recognize the work that they’ve done.

“I think they are probably thinking that a library clerk just sits behind the desk and doesn’t do anything,” Garza said. “I really don’t know how anyone could come into any of these schools and see what Lauren and the other clerks are doing and think we need to nix the job.”

Garza is also frustrated at the job cuts because she believes that they fail to realize the amount of work librarians do on a daily basis.

“It’s really kind of mind-blowing that they expect one librarian to be able to run the library, instruct students, manage the library aides and manage all of the technology,” Garza said. “Just in terms of workload, that’s an insane amount of work to do.”

Zuniga, who became McCallum’s librarian this year, feels like he wouldn’t have been able to balance that workload and adjust to a new job and school if not for Alindogen’s help.

“Having Lauren here from day one was huge,” Zuniga said. “The amount of struggle I would have had on top of being new would have been much greater, and that helps the school so much because if I’m struggling, that affects students.”

After experiencing Alindogen’s support firsthand and seeing their importance at McCallum, Zuniga believes the cuts will do more harm than good. Furthermore, he is curious as to how much they will close the budget deficit.

“I’m not an accountant but I do not think that cutting the library clerk positions is a huge money saving technique as far as I understand,” Zuniga said. “I do think that it is possible to find other ways around it–maybe some restructuring of positions or something like that.”

Orr also feels that AISD should not resort to cutting the librarian clerk position in spite of the budget crisis. 

“I know that times are tough, everybody does, but I think if there are gonna be cuts it needs to come not from the people directly serving students,” Orr said. “You guys are the whole point, so that should be the last line of things we have to cut.”

There is, however, a slight chance that the library clerk position won’t be cut. The board meets to approve the proposed 2025-26 budget on June 26. If enough people protest the cuts, it is possible that the school district might change their budget. 

“Make your voice heard, make your voice known,” Zuniga said. “Libraries are important. We’re better off with them than without them.”