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Lisa Just likes to say that she never ran a quiet library at David Douglas School District. She’d help proofread papers, unjam printers, and teach lessons about citing references and reliable sources. “No ask was too big or too small for any student when I was in the library,” she says.
For much of the past four decades, Just has worked for a school district that currently serves 8,640 students across 14 schools in East Portland. She’s a licensed librarian, which means she has both a teaching certificate and a degree in library media.
She no longer has a full-time job. More than a decade ago, David Douglas swapped out its full-time equivalent of 12.5 licensed librarians for library media assistants: staffers who don’t have teaching credentials. Just one full-time and one half-time licensed librarians remain. The first covers all five of the district’s high school campuses and middle schools. The other works part time for the district’s nine elementary schools.
For Just, gone are the days of face-to-face interaction with students. Her role is much more administrative now—she develops lesson plans for assistants to follow and reads children’s books to figure out which materials align well with the district’s curriculum.
“As a certified librarian, I think it’s a travesty,” she says. “These people who are running the libraries are trying their hardest, but they don’t frankly have the background.”
As the new year begins, Gov. Tina Kotek has made increasing literacy and improving student achievement a central plank of her agenda. Statewide, well under half of students are reading at grade level, and Kotek has pledged to catch up all students to grade-level reading proficiency by the third grade. In 2023, the state House passed the Early Literacy Success Initiative, a $90 million package intended to improve just that, allocating money to help children in kindergarten through third grade by improving curriculum, providing high-dosage tutoring, and training teachers.
But there’s a piece missing in Oregon education that could threaten the governor’s literacy goals. Oregon dwells in the national basement when it comes to certified librarians in its schools, a ranking fueled by dozens of districts without a single librarian stocking the shelves.
A national study shows Oregon ranks 48th among 50 states and the District of Columbia for its ratio of full-time librarians to students, ahead of only Idaho and California. The study, conducted by San Jose State University in 2022 and 2023, found the equivalent of one full-time librarian in the Beaver State served about 3,455 students. By contrast, Vermont, which ranks first, has one librarian per 410 students.
That’s because the decline at David Douglas is reflected statewide. The number of certified librarians in Oregon has fallen steadily for decades, from 818 in 1980 to 178 in the 2023-24 school year.
That decline has hit some students harder than others. Portland Public Schools is doing fine, with 63 certified librarians—that number includes one per high school, and it’s four times as many as the next highest district. But 142 of Oregon’s 197 school districts didn’t report having a single certified librarian in 2023-24. Another 35 had the full-time equivalent of one or less.
That disparity flies in the face of dozens of studies conducted over the past few decades, which have found correlations between certified librarians and improved literacy and test scores, not only in reading, but also in mathematics and other subjects. Notably, several of these studies found that the loss of librarians disproportionately affects students of color and students experiencing poverty.
“You might think schools with school librarians are rich schools and so, of course, those kids are testing better,” says Kate Weber, a longtime advocate for school libraries. “But [studies] look at it in a way that even regardless of parental income or education level, schools with school licensed librarians have better test scores across the board.”
Few people think about what kids read more than certified librarians, who are trained to foster a love of books. Just says one of her favorite tasks as a certified librarian was creating that special place for the kid who felt isolated in the lunchroom or on the playground.
“It’s the intangible things,” she says. “They thank you for having the library there as a safe haven for them.”
Now, Just says, most classified library staffers in her district are put on recess or bus duty, shuffled around where they’re needed. That means elementary school libraries are closed during recess and lunch, so kids can’t opt to spend some quiet time reading there.
In David Douglas, a district where more than 70% of students are students of color and 50% experience poverty, Just and her fellow certified librarian are the only ones qualified to select materials that reflect students’ lives and get them excited about reading. When they take the time to curate those books, Just says, students “feel seen and heard and more a part of the community.”
The consequences of declining licensed librarians extend well beyond grade-school classrooms, says Ayn Frazee, a certified librarian at PPS and the first school librarian to lead the Oregon Library Association.
For starters, she says, public librarians are feeling the brunt of understaffed school libraries as they try to serve young children and families. Public libraries are also not always easily accessible to kids, she says, while libraries at schools meet them where they’re at.
There’s another increasingly valuable skill that she says licensed librarians cultivate: information literacy, or the ability for students to think critically about the information they consume, especially online.
“Our academic librarians are seeing students coming to college that don’t have research skills. They don’t know how to evaluate a resource, they don’t know how to check an author’s credentials,” Frazee says. “That’s a direct result of defunding school library programs, because that’s who’s teaching those skills.”
In an era when students spend much of their days online, Frazee says, that’s a dangerous gap. She takes time to talk to her students about media credibility and artificial intelligence, but she also helps them weed through deep fakes and sexual blackmail. “How can we expect teenagers to navigate that with everything else that they’re dealing with?” she says.
In interviews with WW, school librarians noted again and again that they haven’t been invited to participate in statewide conversations around literacy and information science that they feel qualified to offer insight on. Most recently, they say, they weren’t asked to be part of the conversations around the Early Literacy Success Initiative.
“When all that stuff [on early literacy] came out, nobody even talked to us,” says Weber, the school libraries advocate. “We’re always like, hey, we’re over here.”
The seeming lack of interest in fixing the problem also confuses Jen Maurer, the school library consultant to the Oregon State Library. Maurer says she can’t reconcile why districts and the state have disinvested from something so connected to their education priorities.
“I still don’t understand the disconnect between school districts who say literacy is a priority and ‘let’s get those kids reading on grade level by third grade,’ and they won’t fund a librarian or they won’t fund the library,” she says. “I don’t understand that disconnect.”
WW posed the question to several state education leaders, including Rep. Hoa Nguyen (D-East Portland) who also sits on the David Douglas School Board and worked on the early literacy package. “In the Legislature, I have seen patterns where librarians have not been consulted in regards to policies around literature and books in school,” Nguyen wrote in an email to WW. “That has been a general feedback for some time and what we need to do better in.”
Roxy Mayer, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kotek, tells WW the governor is “always open to hearing input from stakeholders on her initiatives.”
Mayer pointed to Kotek’s efforts in 2019 to pass the Student Success Act, which added $1 billion a year in K-12 state education funding. “Funding for licensed librarians is one of the allowable uses for how school districts spend their funding from the Student Success Act in order to provide a well-rounded education for students,” she said.
Mayer adds that Kotek wants to push for an additional $127 million for early literacy this legislative cycle.
Frazee says the state needs to shift its mindset. Supporting school libraries, she says, is a “high-impact and relatively low-cost” way to commit to literacy. A licensed librarian, she adds, is one of few staff in schools who has the power to touch the lives of every student and family who comes through the doors.
“I keep seeing these initiatives and purchasing these canned curriculums that are really expensive as kind of a way to chip away at this literacy issue that we’re having,” Frazee says. “It’s hard for me just knowing that no curriculum can compare to that human connection that you get with trained, thoughtful, certified staff.”