National Poetry Month 2022- Poem #23- A bad wonderment

 A little back story: This is a wonderment, but it's a bitter, bad wonderment. 

My district, like many others in our state, doesn't fund librarians, nor does it require  schools to have one. My school does not have a librarian, and hasn't for years, but we have always had a paraprofessional to help shelve books. This year, we don't even have that. Teachers are checking books in and out for their kids, but they don't shelve books, or straighten shelves, or set up displays, or anything like that. I can't stand that our library, which actually has lots and lots of great books, as a result of a lot of grants, isn't being taken care of, so about once a month, I go in and try to straighten it. It's not a solution and it's not sustainable, and the whole time I am there, I'm resenting it, but I keep going, because I can't stand that our library is so unloved. 

Tonight's poems are limericks--- three of them. 

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education. —Harold Howe

A school once made a decision

To eliminate the library position

Great books it did have

but the library went bad

Clearly a complete lack of vision. 

There once was a school with bad scores

Whose stakeholders always wanted more

What they didn’t know

And what made tests scores low

Phonics rich often leads to book poor. 

A school its library did close,

Every time a slight need did arose

Meetings and tests mattered more

Then letting kids through the doors

And that's how their reading hearts froze.