The most important person for college success may be the disappearing high school librarian

When Trameka Pope was a senior in high school, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to leave home for college. Statistically, it was unlikely that Pope—whose daughter was a baby at the time—would go to college at all, much less successfully navigate the academics once there. She not only got there, however, she finished her bachelor’s degree in public health at Western Illinois University in three years and is applying for a master’s program.

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At Wendell Phillips Academy on Chicago’s South Side, Pope found the critical support she needed at the daily college readiness class offered by the high school’s librarian, K.C. Boyd, who also researched many of the scholarships that made it financially feasible for Pope to go to school.

“She was really there for me,” Pope says of Boyd, “especially when I was trying to decide how far to go because I had a daughter.”

From specialized scholarships to budgeting for book fees, Boyd gave her students the information they needed to succeed. It was information Pope would later learn many others weren’t getting.

“The way that she pushed our class with college information and making sure we were prepared, my friends I met in college didn’t have that,” says Pope.

Boyd, a Library Journal Mover & Shaker, is now a library media specialist at a Washington, DC, public middle school. Her college readiness efforts at the Chicago high school were part of a larger phenomenon of librarians working alongside guidance counselors to help students not only get to college but thrive once they are there. Librarians have long offered resources, such as SAT prep materials and college guidebooks. But today, many are doing much more, helping students through the increasingly byzantine process of selecting, applying to, getting aid for, preparing for, and persevering in college.

That process is particularly onerous for low-income students, 68 percent of whom enroll in two- or four-year college after high school, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, compared to 83 percent of high-income students. Only 14 percent of low-income students receive a bachelor’s degree, compared to 60 percent of high-income students.

Librarians are crucial contributors to college readiness in schools strapped for resources, which makes it even more painful that librarians are being cut in many of those districts and schools. There are 19 percent fewer librarians in schools today than in 2000, and schools serving majority minority students have lost the most, according to SLJ research. Read more here . . . .