It’s Banned Book Week, and New York City is not immune from ever-increasing attempts to curtail freedom of speech and ban books. Recognizing this threat, in June the Legislature passed The Freedom to Read Act, a bill to protect our school libraries and librarians from book bans. In an era of Project 2025, Moms for Liberty and censorship, such legislation draws a critical line in the sand.
But we need to address the whole problem. We must protect and prioritize the very institutions where our students’ freedom to read flourishes: school libraries.
Nearly 40% of book challenges occur in school libraries. That school libraries are a battleground in the Project 2025 playbook is no accident. They are vital to our students and our society. Sadly, before Project 2025 even began, New York City had already self-obliterated most of its public-school libraries and librarians.
In 2021, my children’s public school lost our librarian and the wonderful programming she provided. I started organizing with other parents. After finding out that school-librarian loss was happening at an alarming rate across the city, we formed Librarians = Literacy, a campaign to bring back school librarians for all NYC public school students.
In our progressive city, most New Yorkers we meet — parents, community members, elected officials, and education-policy makers — claim to be pro school library, pro intellectual freedom, and anti censorship. Yet we’ve allowed our school librarians and libraries to be devalued and disappeared as another education-budget casualty.
In 2005, there were almost 1,500 librarians in the nearly 1,600 NYC public schools. In 2023, that number was down to about 260. Current data is scant and hard to come by because Mayor Adams’ Department of Education has been uncooperative in confirming or acknowledging these numbers even when pressed by elected officials.
What we’ve lost is much more than books. School libraries have a tremendous data-backed impact on student success, and school library programs — which go way beyond checking out books — can’t function properly without highly-trained pedagogues. The presence of a certified librarian in a school is proven to increase schoolwide literacy, test scores, media literacy, research skills, college preparedness, graduation rates, and more.
Now, in an era of censorship and misinformation, school librarians are more important than ever. They are on the frontlines of safeguarding our students’ learning and liberties. They curate diverse collections allowing all school children to feel seen and valued. They teach students how to find factual information and that not everything that they read online is true.
While our public libraries are amazing institutions, not all kids use them. A school library is many students’ best — often only — chance to interact with a comprehensive collection of free books and media. Unsurprisingly, school librarian and library loss is affecting high-poverty schools in our city at significantly higher rates.
Lack of access to a functioning school library run by a trained pedagogue is another form of book banning. One could argue a more significant form, affecting all of the books and all of the students in entire schools and sometimes neighborhoods. If we’re serious about standing up to censorship and making our city and schools bastions of intellectual freedom and equity we must invest in literacy, intellectual freedom, and support for our most vulnerable students.
To truly safeguard our students’ freedom to read, we must protect places where it flourishes: school libraries.
The first step is to publicly acknowledge the rampant school librarian and library loss. In May, Librarians = Literacy and our allies worked with school librarian champions in the City Council to pass “The Librarians Count Law,” requiring the DOE to report data on school librarians and libraries. But we must go further.
We’re urgently calling on Gov. Hochul to sign the Freedom to Read Act into law. But we also need to fund the existing state mandates for school libraries and librarians and expand upon them to include librarians (not just library spaces) in elementary schools.
We must ensure that the next mayor of New York will be a champion for school libraries and work to find real solutions to school librarian loss. In the coming years, we hope that every New York public school student will be marking Banned Books Week with their school librarian, secure in the knowledge that we have protected their freedom to read.
Fox is a mom to two NYC public schools students, a children’s book author, and the co-founder of Librarians = Literacy, a campaign for certified librarians and libraries in all NYC public schools.
