Most Philly schools don’t have librarians, but some community members are filling the gaps

Campbell Simmons: It’s back to school season and Many students at Philadelphia Public Schools are back in the classroom interacting with their new teachers and classmates. But if they head down the hall to check out a book from the school library, they might not be able to because years of budget cuts and staffing changes have left most Philly public schools without a certified librarian. Around the Block reporter Milan Parker reports that some community groups are stepping in to fill the gap.

Milan Parker: At Laura W. Waring School in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden neighborhood, the library is a place where students can choose their own books. They can look for graphic novels, sports stories, or the next book in a series that they’ve already started. But that was not always the case. Donna Perkins is the chair of Friends of Warring Library, which is a group of volunteers that manages the library. She says that when volunteers first got involved with rebuilding the school’s library in 2016, the library did not look like a place where students could borrow books.

Donna Perkins: When we saw it that day, it looked like someone’s old full of old furniture and old books and dusty. And that was really the impetus to Working closely with the principal and figuring out how and what we needed to do to make a library in that space functional for the students at Waring.

Milan Parker: Friends of Waring spent the next several years cleaning out the space, organizing books, building a collection, and working with the school to carve out library time and student schedules. In 2022, the group opened the library as a lending library for students from kindergarten through the eighth grade. But the dust that it collected in Warring’s library did not happen by accident. Jenny Lowman is the coordinator of the Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians. She says Philadelphia once had far more school librarians, 176 of them, in 1991. BaLowman says that number began to fall as the district faced major funding problems in the early 2000s.

In Philly, public schools moved to a system known as site-based budgeting.

Jenny Lowman: And so, what Philadelphia did was to sort of decentralize much of its budgeting. And so, it would give the building principals a certain pot of money and say, here’s your money. You figure out how to use it for your building. Of course, it wasn’t enough money. So principals had to prioritize: do I need an assistant principal? Do I need a counselor? Do I need a dean of students or disciplinarian? Do I need a school librarian? And when they only had a small amount of money, the school librarians got deprioritized.

Milan Parker: Lowman says, as librarians retired or left their jobs, many were not replaced. Laura W. Waring School is one of many Philadelphia schools where community members have worked to bring the library back into use. Katelin Beck works with WEPAC, a nonprofit that partners with public elementary schools in West and Southwest Philadelphia. She says that many of the schools that reach out still Still have a room built to be a library and sometimes even books on the shelves, but no staff member assigned to run it.

Jenny Lowman: All of the schools that reach out to us, they have what once was a vibrant library space where kids used to get to rotate through. There was once a school librarian there, but because of budget cuts in the school district of Philadelphia, unfortunately, those spaces. Most of them have sat empty for quite a while.

Milan Parker: We PAC helps schools get those spaces ready for students again. The organization catalogs books, organizes collections, and trains volunteer teams to lead regular library programming. Katelin says during a library visit, students hear a story, take part in an activity, and then get the chance to choose and check out books.

Katelin Beck: And the most important part of library programming, and the thing I think that kids get most excited about, is they get to then check out books. So, a large part of what the volunteers are doing is actually exploring the library with the kids and trying to honor requests and helping students find what it is they’re looking to read.

Milan Parker: Katelin says: instead of deciding what students should be interested in, We PAC volunteers try to make room for students’ choices.

Jenny Lowman: And we really do try to give students agency with that part of their day. So we’re generally not trying to steer kids to a certain section or a certain level of book based on a reading level or

Katelin Beck: things like that. Like we really do try to honor what the kids are interested in and giving them choice about what they’re reading. so that they can feel empowered. And I think it just makes the process more exciting for students.

Jenny Lowman: And we know that so much of a student’s day is prescribed to them.

Katelin Beck: Like they don’t get really much of a say in which classes they go to or what they’re learning in their classes. So we do really try to make sure that library time is a time for them to get a say in, you know, what is it that they’re reading. And Donna at Friends of Warring says that’s one of her favorite things about volunteering with the school library. If a student wants a book about their favorite athlete or a story connecting to something they’re learning in class, volunteers can add it to the group’s wish list. And while Friends of Warring keeps students’ autonomy in mind, families also get permission before 7th and 8th grade students can check out books from the young adults section.

Because much of the collection comes from donations, Friends of Warring has some flexibility in the range of books it can offer. Donna says there’s something special about watching a reading-neutral student become a reading-positive one.

Donna Perkins: You know, I had one student this year, actually. I’ll never forget. He was adamant he wasn’t going to read, and I kept asking him what. He was watching and what he was interested in. And I ordered a graphic novel series that he said he would read. And he read them. He was reading the series throughout the school year, which, of course, just made me so happy. So those little wins. That hopefully we’re laying this foundation not only to help them improve their literacy and comprehension, which we all know is a challenge throughout the country, not just here in Philadelphia, but hopefully, this is the lifelong love of reading.

Milan Parker: Rather than focusing on what their schools may Be missing. Volunteers and community members like Donna Perkins, Katelin Beck, and Jenny Lohman are focused on what they can do right now. And Donna Perkins, for Friends of Warren Library, says she sees the impact that the effort has had on her community.

Donna Perkins: People say, How can I help? How can I get involved? What can I do? We’ve created this group of volunteers that’s just this. Wonderful community of people in our neighborhood that are passionate about children and literacy and wanting to have a positive influence on these students.

Milan Parker: For Around the Block, I’m Milan Parker.