How did 11 large, urban K–12 districts manage to add librarians and increase library services for their students when the U.S. is experiencing a decades-long decline in school librarian staffing? The School District of Philadelphia and the volunteer advocacy organization Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians teamed up to find out—and to create a replicable model that they and other districts could use to achieve similar success. The recently released report Restoring Librarians: Challenges and Strategies by Debra Kachel, a retired school librarian, affiliate faculty member at Antioch University Seattle, and PARSL Core Team member, details how the districts overcame major hurdles and beat the odds.
The report is one component of a two-year, $150,000 federal Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program planning grant awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the School District of Philadelphia in partnership with PARSL. “For more than 20 years, the district has had very few librarians [currently the equivalent of three full-time certified librarians for 117,000 students and 218 schools],” Kachel told PW. And, like many large urban districts, Kachel acknowledges that Philadelphia faces its share of challenges, e.g. buildings in disrepair, schools without air conditioning, a shortage of teachers, not enough funding for textbooks and materials. “What we hope to do with this report is to point out that all these other larger urban districts have similar issues, but they were able to make [school librarians] a priority and make it happen for kids,” Kachel noted. “Our thinking was, if we could demonstrate to [SPD] how other districts are doing this, that maybe we could open their eyes and say this is possible here. We’re not here to shame and blame. We are only here to help and assist,” she added. “We want to do better for the Philly city kids.”
Last fall, Kachel conducted multiple video conference sessions with 12 school library leaders from a selection of districts that had recently hired school librarians: Boston, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Chicago, Dallas, District of Columbia, Eugene (Ore.), Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Oakland (Calif.), and San Francisco. According to Kachel’s findings, nine of the 11 participating districts have minority enrollment that exceeds 60%. And in seven of the 11 districts, the number of economically advantaged students exceeds 50%.
Among the topic areas discussed were Barriers and Solutions, Stakeholders, Advocacy, and Funding. During the interviews, the top barriers to adding school librarians mentioned included a lack of understanding of what the school librarian role is. Kachel pointed out that many administrators and principals today have never experienced an effective school library program headed by a certified, instructional librarian. When that’s the case, they don’t know how important the school librarian’s role is, or the criteria for finding and hiring a good candidate. Decentralized funding was another barrier. Districts and principals have autonomy over budgets and staffing for their schools and must often juggle various staffing needs, which puts a librarian role in competition with that of a nurse, counselor, or classroom teacher.
In terms of stakeholders, more than half of Kachel’s interview subjects said that strong leadership on the part of the superintendent and the principal were key to increasing librarian staffing. The interviewees noted that in the best-case scenarios, the principal’s vital role also includes maintaining good communication with their district’s library director regarding staffing needs and changes. And eight of the 11 interviewees told Kachel that their teacher’s union played a pivotal role in supporting the addition of librarian positions. Some other stakeholders mentioned in the interviews included public librarians, parents and communities, school board; local, state, and national school library organizations; and EveryLibrary.
Those participating in Kachel’s report agreed that consistent advocacy efforts spearheaded by strong library leaders were a significant factor in the districts’ ability to hire school librarians. The interviewees cited members of the central office, superintendents, and school boards as the key targets for advocacy as they control the district funding.
Unanimously, the interviewees stated that centralized funding for school librarian positions is the best way to achieve equity of library services for schools in the district. “Centralized funding/mandates for the role is everything,” one interviewee said. “In our state the districts that do this are the ones that have librarians in every school.”
An Uncertain Future
The report’s findings provide a solid base for moving forward, according to Kachel. “There are two other large components of that grant, and we are just now starting to work on those,” she said. “The second component was to deal with the pipeline: how are we going to recruit and educate enough people to take school librarian jobs in the city. And then the final component—which we haven’t started yet—is to develop a long-range model for how a district like Philadelphia can bring back school library programs with certified staff.” More specifically, she added, “What we hope to do is take some of the ideas that we got from these 11 school districts, and blend that into a five-year strategic plan.”
Though Kachel said that some preliminary work on phase two of the grant had begun, she worries that the overall project may not see completion in the wake of the Trump administration’s call, via a March 14 executive order, to eliminate IMLS. Legal action to block the president’s efforts is well underway including lawsuits filed by 21 states’ attorneys general—Rhode Island v. Trump—and by the American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees—ALA v. Sonderling.
And with IMLS’s fate still in question, on April 15, SDP received word that its librarian restoration grant had been canceled in an email using the language “IMLS Grant Termination and Closeout Process.” But after a May 1 PARSL meeting, Kachel shared an update. “The School District of Philadelphia has decided to support the grant activities, as much as financially possible, even without the federal funds,” she said. “We may curtail some of the site visits to other urban school districts where librarians are being reinstated and some of the conference plans. But the major work—creating education pathways to boost the pipeline of certified school librarians and the five-year strategic plan on how to incrementally add and fund school librarians and libraries,” she noted, will move ahead in some form. “That is good news!” she added, citing PARSL’s gratitude for SDP’s continuing support.
PARSL and SDP were already looking beyond the initial grant, too, aiming to establish a lasting impact. Those plans have been all but scuttled as well. “Before this all hit the fan, we submitted another IMLS Laura Bush grant to continue this work, and that would be a three-year implementation project where we were really going to work on the pipeline, how to educate teachers and perhaps instructional aides, how to get their teaching degrees and the library certification and move on to the next step,” Kachel said. “Hopefully, by the end of those three years, we would have created new school librarian positions in the district and at least placed some qualified staff.”
Now, Kachel said that the 2026 pre-proposal her team submitted to IMLS back in September to fund the implementation “will most likely never be considered. The Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian program has always been ‘discretionary’ funding intended to improve diversity among the librarian pool, so even if some of IMLS comes back, it is doubtful the LB21 program will.”
The dire ripple effect of IMLS cuts, as well as the equally devastating moves to eliminate the Department of Education, of course extend far beyond Kachel’s current project. “In terms of the big picture, I am really concerned that the Common Core of Data that the National Center for Education Statistics has been collecting for since the 1980s is going to end, and that is the only source of uniform data that we have from all the states and all the public schools,” she said. “If that ends, research will be hugely impacted.”
Without NCES, researchers will have to rely on the way each state collects data, if they do so at all. “We will have no uniform, comprehensive, across-the-nation data,” Kachel said. She also envisions that the cutting of federal agencies and positions is going to trickle down to the state level. “The state departments of ed are going to eliminate people. They’re not going to get the Library Services and Technology Act money from the feds that has been funding departments of libraries in state government,” she said. “It is likely all of that could be gone, and then you will have no one tracking, even at the state level, what is going on in terms of library services for kids.”
Admittedly, there are “a lot of improvements” that could be made to NCES data collection on school libraries, Kachel said, such as updating the definition of a certified school librarian, and information on technology should be included. “My concern is, is this going to be farmed out to some private institution that is going to be told behind the scenes what data to collect and what not to collect? And, if certain data is collected that they don’t like, is it going to be suppressed? The integrity of the data is of huge concern.”
Citing another critical concern in light of funding cuts, Kachel pointed out that “inequity is going to increase across the nation.” “Schools and school districts located in wealthier communities will be just fine, but schools in impoverished areas with a large number of students of color and special needs students—that is going to be a disaster.”
Kachel touted one positive development amid all the turmoil, revealing that the research and interactive website from her and Keith Curry Lance’s IMLS-funded study examining the national decline in school librarianship—the SLIDE Project—is being preserved. “In the final year of the SLIDE project, Keith approached San Jose State University and Anthony Chow [director of the SJSU’s School of Information], and the University is now financially supporting the SLIDE website and all our data. And Keith and our web designer have added the most recent—2023–24—NCES data to it. We’re very appreciative to San Jose State that there is a commitment to keep this going.”
Kachel and the PARSL team plan to forge ahead in spite of the great obstacles before them. “I’m a firm believer in the pendulum,” Kachel said. “The pendulum is just about hitting the wall, and the only place for it to come is back. And I think when all these parents and relatives and grandparents and others begin to see how these policies are impacting children they know, there’s going to be a huge pushback. I’m going to wear my rose-colored glasses and keep my fingers crossed and hope.”
