Philadelphia in recent years has had only two full-time librarians in a school district with 216 schools and 118,000 students. It’s a challenge Debra Kachel, an affiliate faculty member at Antioch University, has been working to solve.
Kachel is partnering with the district on a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study how other urban school systems rebuilt their school library programs and funded training for a new generation of librarians. Using the findings, the plan for the project is to develop a long-term plan to restore school library services in Philadelphia and train school librarians.
But following layoffs and grant cancellations at the federal institute last week as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to close the small agency, Kachel is concerned her project is in jeopardy.
“While everyone always says they love libraries, they support libraries, libraries are wonderful, when it comes to funding libraries, that’s a different conversation,” said Kachel, who previously led another project investigating a declining number of school libraries and librarians that received institute funding.
More than a dozen recipients of Institute of Museum and Library Services grants received late-night emails last week alerting them that their awards were suddenly canceled, effective April 4, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents many federal employees.
Though Kachel did not receive that message, she and her colleagues are unclear and concerned about the future of their grant.
The cancellations came as the Trump administration ramped up its efforts to shutter the museum and library services institute, the largest source of federal funding for the nation’s libraries and museums. The institute was among seven agencies President Donald Trump named in a recent executive order that directed the agencies to close themselves down “to the maximum extent” allowed by law.
Soon after the executive order, the institute placed its entire workforce of 77 employees on administrative leave, but then brought back roughly a dozen to carry out the agency’s legally required obligations, according to a staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The downsizing and Trump’s order drew litigation on Friday, with 21 state attorneys general suing the administration and asking a federal judge to halt the closure of the institute and two other small agencies. Also on Friday, two Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee wrote to the institute’s acting director seeking documents and more information on how the institute is winding down its operations in response to Trump’s executive order.
The largest portion of the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ budget is its state grants program that has sent more than $160 million annually to all states in recent years to support general library services statewide as well as some education-focused services such as library tutoring programs and professional development for teachers.
Lisa Guernsey, director of the Learning Sciences Exchange at New America, a nonpartisan research organization based in Washington, said Congress has the ultimate say over the future of the museum and library services institute, which was formed in 1996 and reauthorized in 2018 during Trump’s first term.
“The bottom line is: To make cuts this drastic, Congress has to have a say. That’s how our government is set up,” she said.
An Institute of Museum and Library Services spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The institute has funded a variety of efforts to boost the ranks of school librarians
The ranks of school librarians nationwide have dwindled over the last decade-plus by 20 percent—the equivalent of roughly 10,000 lost positions from 2009 to 2018. Philadelphia exemplifies this trend. In 2023, the city’s schools employed two full-time librarians across its 216 schools, down from 176 in the early 1990s (when the district had 259 schools).
In response, researchers started looking into strategies Philadelphia could use to restore school librarians, and last year the school district in partnership with the advocacy group Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians (PARSL) received a grant of nearly $150,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Kachel, as a PARSL member, led the first part of the project. For a report published earlier this year, she interviewed school library directors at 11 urban districts about how they’d increased their ranks of school librarians, sometimes while facing budget shortfalls and declining enrollment. Past research has shown a positive correlation between reading achievement and having full-time, qualified librarians at schools.
The second and third parts of the proposal involved recruiting students for a librarian certification program and creating a five-year plan to implement school library programs across the district.
Kachel said her team was planning to do a residency program and provide funding for students or part-time librarians to simultaneously complete their school librarian certifications while working full-time in school libraries.
“Our preliminary thinking was to target the schools that have the most needy students—students who are homeless, students who are in poverty, students of color—when their literacy scores are really low,” Kachel said. “Those are the schools [where] we were thinking we would set up these school libraries as soon as possible.”
But Kachel worries about whether her plan will work now without key museum and library services institute staff to distribute reimbursements for the PARSL grant or award future funding.
“In the bigger picture, what we’re doing here is eliminating people’s right to information,” Kachel said, “and we are only going to get the information sources that a Trump executive office wants us to have.”
Other institute grants have supported training for school librarians and efforts to boost their ranks.
Deborah Rinio, an assistant teaching professor and program leader for the library media certificate program at Montana State University, completed her institute-funded project in 2020, also with an eye toward boosting the ranks of school librarians, particularly with knowledge to serve Indigenous communities. The project’s goal was to redesign the curriculum of Montana State’s library media certificate program to train more certified school librarians, but also to train them on “Indigenous perspective and culturally responsive pedagogy,” Rinio said.
The project funded scholarships so 30 students in Montana and Alaska could attend the program and apply it toward their certification. The grant also allowed the project members to put together an advisory board of experts and consultants on creating an Indigenous-focused school librarian preparation curriculum.
Other services that help students are affected by institute cuts
Sometimes, school libraries don’t have the materials students need, so public libraries step in. But their services are also facing uncertainty from the downsizing at the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The interlibrary loan system for Michigan’s libraries often helps smaller libraries across the state get students books they need. But that system is at risk as the institute’s state grants program faces uncertainty, said Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association.
“It’s taken 20 years to put together a very solid, very stable, very efficient system with very few dollars that are coming from our federal government that are somewhat unmatched by our state government,” Mikula said.
For now, the system will keep operating, but its future is uncertain, as librarians are unsure of what will happen when the time comes to request reimbursement for grant-covered expenses and renew their funding, she said. Every state has a different timeline for requesting reimbursement.
A public library in Columbus, Miss., already paused its Hoopla service—an app that lets library card holders access audiobooks and e-books—because of the suspension of grant processing as the federal institute has shrunken its staff.
“We may start feeling, and families may start feeling, a thousand little cuts from this, as well as some larger cuts that can really do some harm and make life harder for families,” said Guernsey, from New America.
