The Express recently published comments from Keystone Central School District Superintendent Dr. Francis Redmon confirming the district’s intention to shed library staff — dropping from four librarians to just one.

One librarian, for a district with a geographic footprint of just under 1,000 square miles.

If it sounds like we’re winding up for a lengthy spiel about how important librarians are…

Well, sort of.

Redmon, in his comments, even acknowledged this:

“We know that librarians are important to our students, our schools and our district, and in the best-case scenario we would have librarians in all of our buildings. KCSD, much like many other districts in our area and the commonwealth, has decided to change how our students access our libraries and the books and materials within those spaces,” Redmon said. “The costs of providing our students with robust learning experiences are increasing far faster than the revenues we receive from state and local sources.”

Look, folks. There is no replacement for a good book for a developing youngster, and there is even less of a replacement for a skilled librarian who can help a struggling kid find their niche and really ignite a love of reading.

Multiple of our staff members are English majors. We’re no strangers to books.

Some of us were always voracious readers as kids, while others needed a little push to really take off.

This can make the difference between a child finding a love of reading vs a child who remains steadfast in turning up a nose at books.

All the libraries in the world don’t have a lick of difference if they aren’t staffed by book-lovers who know their collection and know the students who visit, and can fuse those two knowledges together in furtherance of education.

While we are heartened to hear the district’s intent to keep their library collections and retain student access, it is a blunt truth that the value of a library is greatly diminished in the absence of its caretaker.

We do not pretend this is a simple matter.

Redmon is correct that costs are increasing — now faster than ever. The Express reported last week that the administration is recommending a tax increase for the third year running.

Like many of our readers, we feel that this rate of tax increases is unsustainable and will cause hardship to our sizable population that is on a fixed income, be it from age or disability.

There are no easy decisions with a district as vast as KCSD, and we recognize the efforts that the board members have put in and continue to put in — especially as the school board has turned more contentious in recent years with members of different ideological backgrounds winning seats.

Every member has their own range of experience and skills that they can bring to bear on the district’s problems.

We ask, now, that these members — in conjunction with the community and the administration — really think about what the point of a school district is.

Is it a glorified daycare, meant to keep kids occupied and out of trouble while the parents work?

Is it an opportunity for those involved to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense?

Or is it a common good that we all put in for: a school, where kids go to learn and become smarter and better educated — if not, perhaps, wiser — than their parents.

We know this is a loaded subject, and again, we want to stress the complexity of the challenges facing the district.

No matter how much community members may want to go in and start calling for administrators’ heads, the solutions are rarely so simple. And, let’s face it, the administration will never cut the administration — just as politicians will never limit their own authority or bankrolls.

We want to leave you with a worrying similarity to the challenges facing KCSD, here in this very community.

LHU — now Commonwealth University-Lock Haven, which we will still refer to here as LHU for convenience and familiarity — has tread many of these same paths in previous years.

Enrollment was declining as costs increased. To the outside observer, administrative staff seemed to swell, and the college put more emphasis on things like sports and vanity projects like expensive campus remodels in an attempt to entice students to sign up — and alumni to donate and stay invested.

The cost at LHU was programming.

Small departments like philosophy and economics and music became footnotes — losing the ability for students to major in them, remaining as vestigial classes to satisfy general education requirements.

In the merger into Commonwealth University, many of the professors moved on — individuals who shaped the lives of countless students who passed through their doors, including some of the people who work at this newspaper.

The college survives. But to those of us who went there, it is unrecognizable; a shadow of what it was.

We do not want that fate for KCSD.

The district has problems. It always has, and realistically it probably always will, to a greater or lesser degree.

But we would urge that fiscal difficulties not come out of the purses of those who can ill afford it, nor out of the futures of our children in the form of lost educational capacity.

We thank you. So does our future.