In Philly, school librarians are an endangered species. But the district could soon help lead a renaissance.

Certified school librarians have become an endangered species in the Philadelphia School District: Systemwide, there were the equivalent of just two full-time librarians last year for 216 schools, down from 176 for 259 schools in the early 1990s. Experts have said the city’s school library situation is perhaps the starkest of any big-city district in the U.S.

But that could change.

The district plans to have in place early in the school year a director of school libraries, a position it hasn’t staffed in years, and, with the help of a grassroots group of school library activists, it was just awarded a federal grant to develop a model for how Philadelphia and other urban districts could “restore effective school libraries with certified school librarians.”

The Urban School Library Restoration Project has been allotted $149,120 by the U.S. Institute of Museums and Library Services. It was one of 35 projects funded this year under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian program. The district is the beneficiary, but it partnered with the Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians (PARSL) in applying for the grant, and that organization will provide assistance.

“We are looking forward to reimagining and working toward developing a model of restoring librarians and libraries,” a spokesperson for the district said in a statement.

After watching the number of school librarians dwindle to nearly zero over the last several decades, the fact that Philadelphia is now possibly about to help lead a renaissance feels as if it’s a pinch-me moment to Corinne Brady, who runs a team of volunteers who staff the school library at John B. Kelly in Germantown. (Kelly, like a few dozen volunteer-run school libraries in the district, has no certified librarian.)

“To our amazement, and all the hard work, we got the grant,” said Brady. “Now the ball is really in the school district’s court. Now, they have to put the money where their mouth is.”

The work by the new director, alongside PARSL, will begin immediately, and will fall under three separate parts. The first phase will include compiling research, checking with city school systems that have successfully recently restored or added some school librarians, including Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and New York. An analysis of best practices, challenges and lessons learned will eventually be written.

The district and PARSL also promised to help build a pipeline for new certified school librarians; since the school system signaled a long time ago that it wasn’t hiring new ones, local programs have dried up, including one at Drexel University. The grantees will look at ways current teachers might earn school library certifications, as well as create possible pathways for those who don’t currently hold teaching certificates, such as school paraprofessionals. They will look for those pathways to be accessible to diverse populations.

Finally, the grantees hope to deliver a five-year strategic plan for Philadelphia to restore school librarians — with the aim of replicating the work in other cities.

It is, says Debra Kachel, a school library expert, professor, and PARSL director of advocacy, an audacious goal, given the state of school librarians in Philadelphia now. But it’s an important one.

“This is a big, serious problem that has taken decades to get where we are right now,” said Kachel, who worked for years as a Lancaster County school library director. “It’s going to take some serious planning and buy-in from all the stakeholders to put together. We’re considering all kinds of funding sources; we’re going to have to braid them together.”

Philadelphia began shedding school librarians around the time of the state takeover of the district, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The district’s finances were at crisis level, and when Superintendent David Hornbeck moved to school-based budgeting, decisions about which employees to keep and which to cut were left to principals.

“School district librarians would retire, and they just wouldn’t get replaced,” said Jenny Lowman, a PARSL founder. “Slowly, they started disappearing.”

Principals could pay for librarians if they wanted, they were told, but there really wasn’t a choice for most schools, which also lacked money for full-time nurses, counselors or basic supplies.

District leaders suggested that traditional libraries were an extra, not as necessary with the advent of technology, and that children had adequate access to books through classroom libraries. The rooms that had been used as libraries often became meeting rooms, or repurposed for something else, with collections frozen in time or pulled off shelves altogether.

Occasionally, a school has pulled off a miracle: Parents, teachers or others in the community, with connections and the ability to fundraise, have reopened a library, but without a librarian. And the nonprofit West Philadelphia Alliance for Children supports the work, too, helping operate volunteer libraries at 13 district schools.

Lowman, who formerly worked as a lawyer at the Education Law Center, also served as executive director at West Philadelphia Alliance for Children for a time. She always loved and supported school libraries, but the experience at the nonprofit galvanized her.

“My second day there, I said, ‘This is ridiculous. Why are we doing this? Why are we allowing this to happen to people? Why are we allowing the district to rely on the kindness of strangers to run a small number of its libraries?’” Lowman said.

Lowman also serves as a school board member in Cheltenham and it is not lost on her that suburban districts such as hers have school libraries and librarians.

“We would never eliminate libraries in Cheltenham,” Lowman said. “People would pitchfork my house if we did that. We have amazing libraries, but the fact that 30 seconds away, there’s a school district where kids don’t have these types of resources is so unfair.”

Advocates from the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, mostly retired educators, sounded the alarm for years, its members decrying the lack of Philadelphia school libraries and librarians while testifying in public meetings.

But in 2022, those volunteers, as well as Lowman and Brady and others interested in school libraries, came together, and the Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians, was born. It eventually grew to 900-plus members, with people who kept testifying at meetings, but also ran tables at community fairs, and spread the word every way they could think of.

Buy-in from the administration seemed to shift some when Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. came to Philadelphia in 2022. He came from North Carolina, from districts that had librarians, and wherever he went, he repeated the same thing: He intended to make Philadelphia the fastest-improving, big-city school district in the U.S.

“We introduced ourselves, got in people’s faces,” Brady said. “We did Zooms and fairs and festivals. Maybe [Watlington] was tired of us knocking on the door.”

The research is also persuasive: Students who attend schools with full-time, certified school librarians fare better on reading tests than those who do not.

And in Philadelphia, two out of three kids cannot read on grade level; those who do not are far more likely to drop out of school.

Kachel tells two stories to illustrate the human cost of the school library desert: At one event by the Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians, a student made a bookmark. He crafted it carefully, then asked the volunteers: What is this thing? What do I do with it?

And when fifth graders at John B. Kelly were told at the end of a school year that the middle school they were moving to had no library, they were stunned.

“The students were so upset,” Kachel said. “They said, ‘What do you mean? Where are we going to get our books?’”