The Philadelphia School District’s plans of becoming a national leader in reviving a nearly extinct system of school libraries and certified school librarians now appears to be in jeopardy.

Among the federal agencies President Donald Trump has gutted since taking office in January is the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, which last year awarded the school system a grant to develop a national model for urban districts to revive school libraries.

Nearly every member of the IMLS staff has been laid off. And Debra Kachel, a leader of the Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Libraries, the nonprofit which helped Philadelphia land the federal money and has been its partner in the grant work, said the district hasn’t given her group answers.

Technically, the $150,000 grant is still active. But invoices for the first part of the grant work have not been paid, Kachel said, and “I worry they’re not going to get a cent,” Kachel said of the school system. “We really don’t know if this work is proceeding.”

On April 2, an IMLS official sent grantees, including the district, an email notifying them of the cuts to the organization.

“I honestly do not know what will happen to your awards, so please submit any reimbursements for work completed as soon as possible,” the official, program officer Jill Connors-Joyce, wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Inquirer. Connors-Joyce was among those laid off.

(Multiple lawsuits have been filed attempting to block the Trump administration’s dismantling of IMLS.)

Monique Braxton, district spokesperson, said the school system prioritizes literacy and has “many active literacy spaces,” citing libraries constructed in the district’s two newest school buildings, T.M. Peirce and Cassidy. (Neither of those schools has a certified school librarian.)

“Grant payments are being administered,” Braxton said in a statement. “We are in the planning stages and conducting an analysis of libraries, digital and instructional media centers in the district.”

District officials did not address what the future of school libraries is given the national climate and its own looming budget deficit.

Not a priority?

The district this year has three certified school librarians doing full-time library work, at Central, Masterman, and Penn Alexander. Two additional certified school librarians, at Shawmont Elementary and South Philadelphia High, juggle library work and other teaching responsibilities. The district has 216 schools.

That’s down from 176 full-time, certified school librarians for 259 schools in the early 1990s.

It is, national school library experts say, possibly the worst ratio among all large city school districts.

After years of grassroots protests about the district’s disappearing school library system, library advocates celebrated progress last year. The district won the grant, began the “Urban School Library Restoration Project,” and hired Jean Darnell, a school librarian with a national profile, as director of library science, the first time it had filled such a position in decades.

The first part of the project is complete: research on school systems nationally that have made some progress in library restoration, and a written analysis of that work completed by Kachel.

Also promised, but not yet begun as part of the grant, is building a pipeline for new certified school librarians, working with local institutions to revive school library studies programs, finding ways for current teachers to earn school library certifications and creating pathways for those who don’t now hold teaching licenses to get school library credentials.

The final piece of the work was a five-year strategic plan for the district to restore librarians. It was to be a replicable model for other school systems to use.

Kachel said PARSL has scheduled an emergency meeting for May 1.

“We’re going to have to have some serious conversations, to discuss if there’s any way that we can continue the work without any money, knowing the district might not participate if they stop being paid,” she said.

It’s a pattern that’s repeated for years: When budgets get tight, libraries are often on the chopping block.

“This is the case every single year,” said Kachel, a professor of library sciences. “In 2020, we were making some headway, and then COVID hit. The real issue is that having school libraries and librarians is simply not a priority with this district, and hasn’t been for 20 years.”

‘The brains of the country’

Darnell is currently on medical leave and not authorized to speak on behalf of the district. But in her personal capacity as a school librarian, she said she’s aghast at what she says is a war on libraries and information nationally.

“This is carefully orchestrated,” she said. “This administration wants to erase any semblance of equity, any semblance of balanced representation of history, of true intellectual freedom. But any civilization that has tried to destroy knowledge did not age well.”

Darnell likened IMLS to “the brains of the country” and, she said, “being brain-dead is not the way to go forward.”

As for her work in Philadelphia, Darnell said she has completed her study of the current state of the district’s libraries and asked for the ability to hire 12 librarians, to be allocated based on school need.

She has not received a response from district officials, and has never been given any budget, Darnell said.

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