There aren’t as many librarians in schools as there used to be. At first it wasn’t as noticeable, as the reductions were local and the losses were absorbed by teachers. Nor did it happen all at once: Roles were left vacant after retirements, or they were replaced with lower paid aides or support staff. During the transition to digital learning, school librarians struggled to articulate why their roles were still essential to schools, which left them easy targets when districts faced funding shortfalls, particularly after the 2008 recession.
Since 2000, analysts believe that roughly a quarter of librarian positions in K-12 schools have been lost — if not more. That loss is on full display in Philadelphia, where only five of 218 district schools have a librarian on staff. According to the Read by 4th coalition, 71 percent of fourth graders in Philadelphia, the sixth largest U.S. city by population, are reading below grade level. Both the loss of school librarians in Philadelphia’s school district and its disappointing reading scores caught the attention of Deb Kachel, a school librarian of 30 years.
Kachel has spent the last few years raising awareness of the issue as part of Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians. Recently, the group and the Philadelphia school district won a national Institute of Museum and Library Services grant for $150,000 to develop a plan for bringing librarians back into the city’s public school system. In April, they learned that the library agency had terminated their grant before they could ever submit an invoice.
The librarian alliance and the school district chose to continue working on the project despite the loss of the federal funding. But Kachel says canceling the grant sent a message to Philadelphia area residents which hasn’t been well received.
“People are angry,” Kachel says. “They’re angry that here we are, volunteering to do this work with the school district because the federal government thinks this work is not important for kids.”
Targeted by Executive Order
The trouble for the museum and library institute began on March 14 when President Donald Trump issued an executive order to eliminate the agency. By the end of the month, the Department of Government Efficiency placed most of the agency’s staff on administrative leave. As of April 20, at least 90 of the agency’s grants have been canceled, despite a lawsuit from the American Library Association and government employees union challenging the proposed closure.
On May 1, a U.S. district court issued a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration’s actions. While widely seen as a win for libraries, the temporary restraining order hasn’t led to the reinstatement of any agency grants. Then, on May 13, a Rhode Island district court ordered a halt to the executive order targeting the agency. While advocates celebrate the win in favor of the 21 states’ attorneys general who brought forward the case, they also anticipate the defendants will challenge the preliminary injunction.
Of the museum and library institute’s funding programs, the Grants to States is significant to both public and school libraries. It’s by far the largest source of federal funding libraries receive and is allocated to pay for resources like state-provided digital databases.
“The impact with the withdrawal of IMLS funding is the purchasing power the funds provide to ensure equitable access of digital databases for all learners within a state,” said Becky Calzada, president of the American Association of School Librarians. “The [agency] funds allowed schools to gain access to these vetted, reliably curated information sources for students to use for research.”
But with the restructuring of the U.S. Department of Education, which faces legal challenges on First Amendment grounds, and proposed changes to federal funding distribution, librarians are worried. In Pennsylvania, the library agency’s Grants to States funding sustains POWER Library — a state service that, among other things, provides school libraries with access to research databases.
Maryam Phillips, executive director of the Philadelphia nonprofit Hosting Solutions and Library Consulting, estimates that between a fifth and a quarter of public schools in the state rely solely on POWER Library for student research materials. Hosting Solutions manages POWER Library portals for elementary and teen users.
“It is so important for students to have access to this information to help with their curriculum, their homework, their school journey, especially if their school does not have a library,” said Phillips.
POWER Library is unique in that its partner nonprofit oversees the licensing agreements with the vendors who provide databases to public and school libraries. Schools pay about $250 each year for access to POWER Kids and POWER Teens, curated by Hosting Solutions, with some schools paying a discounted rate based on population. Schools benefit from POWER Library’s economies of scale. Without it, Phillips estimates that every school would have to pay about $56,000 annually to access research databases from trusted vendors like EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest.
While some volatility per year is expected, Phillips says Hosting Solutions and Pennsylvania’s Office Commonwealth of Libraries are treating the current situation with the federal library agency as dire. The nonprofit is asking schools for input, specifically what they consider their top two POWER Library resources and their top three databases used by students and teachers. The responses will help to determine future cuts.
“Ultimately, our role, in addition to designing the library,” Phillips says, “is making recommendations back to the [state] based on what we know, which means here’s an amount of money. Here’s what our librarians say is important. Here’s what we think we can manage with this amount of money or that amount of money.”
Seeking Other Support
Similar triage is happening in other states as a result of the federal library agency’s grant uncertainties. In Michigan, for example, school librarians who are already on high alert about potential budget cuts to districts by Michigan’s Department of Education have gone directly to their representatives in hopes of securing funding for online resources provided through the Michigan eLibrary. Christine Beachler, president of the Michigan Association of School Librarians, anticipates the cuts to Michigan eLibrary would devastate school libraries throughout the state.
“For us to emulate that, it would cost [school districts] so much money, it would be so cost prohibitive, [that] it would be impossible,” said Beachler, who also is district school librarian and library media director for Lowell Area Schools near Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The problem is made worse, Beachler says, because many school librarians have already reduced their library’s print collections to reflect students’ shift to using online sources. But beyond that, dismantling the federal library agency couldn’t come at a more precarious moment, Beachler adds. With more students engaging with AI tools, there is an urgent need for more media literacy education in the Michigan public school system.
“Michigan doesn’t have anything in our state mandating curriculum about information literacy or media literacy — teaching kids how to vet sources,” she said. “I know the last thing that anybody wants to hear is one more required class because we already have so much mandated in the curriculum. But when you have students that are trying to write papers, and you have kids that are getting information from nonreputable websites and media sources … Kids plug things into ChatGPT and they think they’re getting great information. They don’t understand a lot of it is plagiarized. They don’t even know what the original sources are.”
Last month, Beachler and several other Michigan school librarians went to the state capital to make their case: that a $4.8 million deficit from losing federal library grants would deepen the student literacy crisis in Michigan. These school librarians are asking legislators to allocate $5 million from the state’s general budget to safeguard students’ access to reliable sources by continuing to fund the state’s consortium pricing for online databases. Without it, Beachler isn’t sure what students and teachers will do.
“I think everyone would agree that we want things to be done efficiently and as inexpensively as possible,” Beachler said. “But we also have come to rely and depend on the services that are provided, particularly for our students. And so I would hope that people would understand that those are critical years for the kids and critical services for our kids.”
