My DIL mentioned to me this week that in her elementary school library, the hours have been cut to 3 hours every 2 weeks and the students can only check out one book at a time. Granted ... this is a school in CA ... but I was astounded. How will a child ever learn to enjoy reading for fun at that pace?

So I'm curious .... are there any other school libraries and students experiencing a similar lack of access?

A few years ago we were under a big budget crisis in our district.  One of the things we cut was the librarians.  We let go of 2 (we only had 4 to begin with - small district) of our librarians and were sharing the two between four campuses.  We had days where the library was closed and days the students didn't want to visit the library because it was the "dragon" librarian - even teachers avoided her.  We've always had a two book per student rule.  It took a couple of years but we finally were able to get a librarian back full time :)

I'm also in CA, but I'm one at one of the few districts that actually was hiring and giving raises last year.  This year we had no teachers "pink slipped".  The way I think of it is that the rest of the state finally caught up with the budget problems we as a district had been dealing with the past 7-8 years.