At least to a certain extent. My mother was then the "supervisor of instructional materials" and the school district librarian in my home town in California. The largest elementary school contained in its basement the book storage and processing functions for the whole district. It was a 1920s building with six-foot-thick concrete walls that was 70ºF inside when the outdoor summer temperature was more like 100º.
A couple of days each week I would go with my mother to work and we would open boxes of state textbooks and also new library books from many sources, all selected mostly by my mother with OK from the superintendent and director of education (it was then a small district with 100s not 1000s of students and around 50 teachers).
I think she paid me 25¢ per hour out of her own pocket. Each quarter was enough for a Saturday matinee along with a soft drink, popcorn or candy at the local movie house.
In addition, publishers would send her a stream of samples, and she would bring them home and ask me to read and criticize. I have no idea how many literary careers I made or broke. (No, I don't imagine it was much above zero.)
This went on for two or three years, so by the time I was in sixth grade I had read most of the fiction and non-fiction that could be found in the district's K-8 classrooms and libraries, pretty much anything except math, which for me always required a helping hand from a teacher. In some ways this was also a negative experience, as I read much less in high school than many of my classmates.
The point of this story is that in context I was just as qualified to play that role as any of the bluenoses and ideologues who demand to be allowed to overrule educators in today's overheated political society. I knew nearly all of those 50 teachers and would have trusted them implicitly. My exploration of the bookshelves was fun, and nothing bad happened.
