Campaigns Spreading to Reverse Downturn in Library Financing

Some school libraries in Spokane, Wash., are as likely to be dark and empty these days as they are filled with children. Like many of their counterparts in school districts around the state and the country, Spokane officials have scaled back school library services and staffing in response to budget deficits, a problem highlighted in a new survey by the American Association of School Librarians.

A grassroots campaign to salvage those programs in Washington state is taking hold and spreading to other states, however. After collecting more than 5,000 signatures in an online petition, a group of mothers from the 28,000-student Spokane district made some headway in the state capital, Olympia, this month in convincing lawmakers that school libraries need new funding.

“It made me sick that [the library] was being relegated to a kind of supermarket” where students just check out books, said Lisa Layera Brunkan, who founded Fund Our Future Washington with two other mothers, Susan McBurney and Denette Hill, to champion...