PHILADELPHIA — The federal government has officially canceled a Philadelphia School District grant designed to help the system grow a national model for reopening school libraries with certified school librarians.

Officials received word of the cancellation last week, according to information obtained by The Philadelphia Inquirer. District spokesperson Monique Braxton confirmed the cancellation but had no information about whether the system would move forward with plans to revive libraries in the absence of federal funds.

Braxton said that the system is “assessing the implication of the cancellation of the grant” and that the district is “committed to prioritizing reading and literacy.”

The news comes as President Donald Trump’s administration is gutting numerous federal agencies, including the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, which had awarded Philadelphia schools the grant. Nearly all of IMLS’ staff has been laid off; multiple groups are suing over the cuts.

Philadelphia has perhaps the nation’s worst big-city ratio for school librarians; just three schools — Central, Masterman, and Penn Alexander — employ full-time certified school librarians. (Two other schools, South Philadelphia High and Shawmont Elementary, have certified librarians who also have other teaching responsibilities. There are 216 schools in the district.)

Forty years ago, the district had 176 full-time, certified school librarians for 259 schools.

What was the grant?

In 2024, officials trumpeted the news: The district had been awarded a grant from the IMLS to execute the “Urban School Library Restoration Project.” Though the award was modest, $150,000 over three years, it was intended to be a force multiplier, a way for the system to study how a few other districts have restored school librarians, build a pipeline of new and diverse school librarians, and create a five-year plan for the restoration of a Philadelphia school library system.

Just one phase of that plan, the study of other libraries’ work, has been completed. Some of the funding for that part of the project has been paid, but some still remains to be distributed.

Debra Kachel, a leader of the Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians, said Monday that while she was expecting the grant to be canceled in light of federal cuts elsewhere, she had held out hope that the grant was so small in the larger scheme of things “it might slip under the radar.”

But in an internal email sent April 16 and obtained by The Inquirer, Michael Sonkowsky, deputy chief of the district’s grant development office, said it appeared that IMLS “has unilaterally chosen to terminate our planning grant and is directing us to close it out.”

A group has been meeting weekly in Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s office to monitor the impact of Trump administration actions on the district, Sonkowsky wrote; information about the loss of the IMLS group was forwarded to that group.

“I am very sorry this has happened,” Sonkowsky wrote. “It is unprecedented in my experience. I think that the work of this project is very important, and I hope we can find a way to move it forward despite this setback.”

What’s next?

In addition to the loss of the IMLS grant, Philadelphia is in a precarious budget position generally. Watlington recently proposed a $4.6 billion spending plan that would rely on the district spending a whopping $300 million of its reserves to balance the budget and still forecasts a $15 million deficit next year that would grow to $2 billion over five years.

Advocates have been pushing for the restoration of school libraries for years.

“I honestly don’t know where we go from here,” said Kachel, a professor of library science. She wrote the initial IMLS grant report but said that it has been difficult for anyone involved in library work to get face time with upper-level district administration officials, and that there have been no discussions of its contents.

Jean Darnell, who was hired last year as the district’s first director of library science in years, is currently on leave from her job; she previously said she has never been given a budget for library work. Her assessment of the state of district libraries, in which she requested the restoration of 12 school librarian positions, has not been made public.

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