CURRENT POSITION Teacher Librarian & Technology Coordinator, Verona High School, NJ DEGREE MLS, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, 2002 FAST FACT Malespina is the only school librarian in New Jersey to be an elected school board member. FOLLOW all4ed.org/podcast/step-up-and-take-a-lead-librarians; slj.com/story/fighting-cuts-keep-librarians-schools Photo by Joy Yagid

Policy Pacesetter

Librarians face problems ranging from budgets to book challenges, and it takes time, effort, and dedication to battle them. Elissa Malespina was galvanized to act when the South Orange–Maplewood  district, where she lived and formerly worked, wanted to reduce the number of librarians in the middle and high schools. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually the positions were restored. 

“I wouldn’t let up and I kept bothering them and bothering them, squeaking until they finally reinstated the other librarian at the high school” as well as the two middle school librarians, she says.

That process inspired Malespina to run for the school board, and she won. She took action to protect school librarians by putting language around requiring certified school librarians into school policies. “The value of the library was very much a part of the policies I wrote,” she says. “I didn’t tell the school. I snuck the wording in there, hoping they wouldn’t realize.” 

She also revised the process by which people could challenge books, incorporating language into her draft policy that specifies what must be included, and the school board passed it in March. Changes included limiting challenges from anyone other than the parent or guardian of a student in the district or the student themselves. A variety of stakeholders make up the committee that reviews challenges, including a parent, students, librarians, and teachers. Challengers must complete a 30-question document; rather than allowing for a simple cut-and-paste process, there is an individual form for each challenged book.  

Even before she was elected to the board Malespina was active in driving her local schools forward, such as when her family joined, on behalf of her son, a 2017 lawsuit by Black Parents Workshop against the district to ensure that Black students had the same educational opportunities as white ones. The suit was settled in 2020, and Malespina donated her settlement of $25,001 to MapSO Freedom School, which offers student empowerment programming centering youth voices as well as anti-racist/social justice professional development and community events for educators, parents, students, and the community. The $4,999 her son received, she told the local press, would be used for education expenses. 

Malespina is also a leader in the Future Ready Librarians movement and chaired a committee that developed indicators for what a future-ready librarian should look like in New Jersey.