Sasha Killings beamed when Mrs. Elders said, "That must have been a tough book for you - you haven't read such a long one before. Good job!"

Killings, 8, stopped by the library on her last day of summer school last week at Mark Twain Elementary to tell Anne Elders, the school's librarian, that she recently finished Call of the Wild by Jack London.

Elders is intimately familiar with Sasha Killings' reading history, ability and preferences. She can say the same about the other approximately 550 students at Mark Twain.

This fall, most Federal Way students will lose that crucial relationship as the 14.2 librarians who survived the district's budgetary slashing will scramble to cover the bare essentials of library operations at the district's 36 schools.

As soon as the 2006-2007 school year begins, Federal Way school librarians plan to raise their voices in protest.

The librarian's union, the Federal Way Educational Association, will formally lodge grievances against the district on behalf of each of the "reassigned" librarians.

"It can become a really ugly situation," said Jerry Painter, general counsel for the Washington Educational Association. "The grievance process involves several steps and culminates in final and binding arbitration, but it's meant to keep labor disputes out of the court system."

The librarians think the district may have violated the transfer provision of the collective bargaining agreement between FWEA and FWPS when the school board made the decision to "cut" 20 full-time librarian positions.

In addition, there is a stipulation in the contract about having a librarian in each school.

The FWEA contract reads: "The Board further recognizes the importance that staff support specialists such as librarians, counselors, psychologists, speech/language pathologists, nurses, therapists, etc., play in providing a quality education to students. Such specialists will be utilized to augment services to students and to the benefit of the classroom teacher."

The district is contending that this doesn't necessarily mean full-time, and that having a librarian for one day per week satisfies this clause.

"I consider myself an exceptional employee. I'm an award-winning author, I've spent 18 years as a librarian in the Federal Way School District, and they are treating us like something they scrape off the bottom of their shoe," exclaimed Teresa Bateman, the librarian at Brigadoon Elementary and a celebrated children's author of 17 books.

"Apparently we are nothing more than a line item [in the budget], and the notion that the only thing we librarians do is read to kids and stamp books is ludicrous," said Bateman.

According to the district's plan for the coming school year, Bateman will also be the librarian at Olympic View Elementary, although she has yet to visit that school's library and has no idea which books the collection contains.

"We don't know how it's going to work, the district has yet to provide a realistic plan, but it's obvious that our schools will get half the services as before," said Bateman.

At Mark Twain, Elders says she's responsible for about $276,000 in materials and equipment. The collection at Brigadoon contains 22,000 books also valued in the hundreds of thousands. Multiplied by the number of schools in the district, the monetary value of the libraries is significant. The librarians wonder what will happen to the collections without their skillful management.

"I started working in Federal Way just after the district did this same thing [cut librarians] 20 years ago," explained Bateman. "It took me five years to clean up after the last mess. Don't get me wrong, the people who took the place of the librarians then were good people, but they just weren't qualified in library science."

In the past, a typical day for Bateman might include translating a book for a Spanish-speaking student one minute, giving another student a computer program tutorial the next, and alerting a teacher to available resources and conducting a Power Point presentation the next.

All the while, she is staying on top of a collection that is anything but static. She's insuring series are complete, outdated materials moved off the shelves, and top-rated new materials acquired. Bateman said she won't be able to do all of the above, simply due to scheduling, and that the districts' teachers, accustomed to having immediate solutions at their fingertips, will be caught short again and again.

"When the cut librarians are moved into a classroom, they will impact only those 30 students or so, instead of impacting the entire school community," Bateman said.

Although the school board approved the cuts on June 27, upon passage of a revised 2006/2007 budget, the librarians can't start the grievance process until the school year begins and they are formally instructed to move from their posts in the libraries to take up teaching positions in classrooms around the district.

In the meantime, one community member is asking tough questions about the school board's choices and priorities.

Jonathan Harkness, husband of Mary-Anne Harkness, a veteran librarian at Camelot, says he has a background in "crunching numbers" for a living and he and his wife have lived in Federal Way since 1984. Upon first hearing about the decision to cut librarians to head off a $4 million budget shortfall during the coming school year, Harkness has repeatedly asked FWPS Chief Financial Officer Sally McLean for a satisfactory explanation about the district's decision to sacrifice librarians in favor of maintaining hefty principal salaries, and says that he has yet to receive any answer.

"Each of the principals within the district make over $97,000 per year with benefits. The state gives us about $53,000 of that money, the remaining $45,000 we residents pay for... when we passed the latest school levy, it mentioned "administrative costs" - but the public doesn't get to have a say in how much money the district pays it's administrative employees," said Harkness last week.

"It seems incredible to me that Superintendent Murphy and the Board went to the principals of each school to get feedback on what cuts should be made, and yet no one even mentioned that perhaps the principals themselves could take a pay cut, or why not "reassign" two schools for one principal," asked Harkness.

When asked the same question, Sally McLean repeated the district's position that "our administrative costs are among the lowest in the state."

"There is now a complete loss of trust between the principals and the remaining librarians," said Teresa Bateman.

According to data published by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), the base salary of $95,000 for K-12 principals in Federal Way is in the top 15 percentile.

McLean said that the district had to make the cuts from areas that least impact students. Harkness, as well as parents attending the June 27th and subsequent school board meetings, expressed ridicule at the board's solution to cut librarians.

Harkness also questioned a 4.3% COLA increase for administrators.

"The Principals and vice-principals all make hefty salaries to begin with. If the school board knew they were in deep financial trouble, why would they agree to all these unnecessary salary increases in exchange for essential services to children?" said Harkness.

"It is like trying keeping up with the Jones, but starving the children so the parents can drive a new car. Ultimately, it is our elected school board members who are responsible for mismanaging the Federal Way school District budget."

"The district seemed amazed that people were pissed off [about cutting the librarians]," said Teresa Bateman. "You just cut someone who affects every single student in the school, and you are surprised that people are upset?"