(File photo from Getty Images.)
Public school librarians in Ohio are sounding the alarm about book bans and funding cuts.
School librarians have been dealing with challenges in their jobs since they find themselves in the stacks in their local districts.
Proposed regulations aimed at filtering the reading choices students can make have raised concerns, and budget cuts raise some concerns about the future of public school librarians as a mainstay in schools.
“Today, many administrators and school boards view hiring school librarians as a luxury,” said Gayle Schmuhl, president of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association. “I think a lot of school librarians (in Ohio) are just hoping to stay employed.”
Schmuhl said many association members are wondering about the future of their work amid cuts to public school funding in Ohio and the debate over property taxes earmarked for education.
Cuts to the state’s public education have been talked about for decades, especially after multiple Ohio Supreme Court rulings found this to be the case the state did not pay its constitutional share.
In 2022, a model called the Fair Schools Funding Plan was created, based on bipartisan sponsorship, and passed in what some saw as a fresh era for Ohio. The plan was to fund schools based on actual needs in individual school districts.
The model almost passed its planned six-year rollout, but Ohio Republican lawmakers abandoned it in the last operating budget.
Although the most recent state operating budget included a $226 million escalate in school funding, according to the Fair School Funding Plan model he needed at least three times that amount maintain your initial calculations and keep up with inflation.
However, legislators increased the private school voucher financing counted in billions.
Courtney Johnson was a school librarian in Columbus for 10 years, and the reduction in public school funding plans contributed to her return to teaching English.
She worried that while school funding priorities had not been set, cuts could mean she would split her time as a librarian across several district buildings.
“I’m a person who likes to root myself in a place and come back to my ‘workhouse’ every day,” Johnson told the Capital Journal.
Johnson said returning to the classroom also means following the entire class throughout their year of experience, as well as helping children with reading and writing, two passions that brought her to this profession.
“Every child has a story, even if they don’t believe it at first, and I love giving them the space to tell their stories,” Johnson said.
As a librarian, she has seen how crucial it is for parents to read to their children, for students to be given context around other subjects in school in order to gain a “full background knowledge” that will facilitate them decode the words they read, and to encourage connections between children and books.
“We know that when children see themselves in books, they feel more connected to them and enjoy reading more,” Johnson said. “Similarly, children can see how other people live in books and thus develop empathy.”
Part of the job of the contemporary school librarian is to discuss with parents materials that they may find so inappropriate that they request that they be removed from the shelves.
Sharon Hawkes, a retired librarian also with the group Right to Read Ohio, decided to conduct a survey of school librarians using the list of members of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association.
Of those who took part in Hawkes’ study, 56% “experienced incidents of censorship” between 2021 and 2025.
Although she only received responses from 32 school librarians, or about 10% of all school librarians in the state, she said these experiences still point to a challenge in Ohio.
“We’re getting some indication of what’s going on,” Hawkes said, noting that because each state doesn’t have a standard survey system to study censorship in libraries, the numbers from organizations like the American Library Association may be smaller than the actual number of cases nationwide.
According to the ALA, the American Library Association reported 98 attempts to censor 355 books in Ohio between 2021 and 2024, and last year there were seven attempts to censor 129 books.
Schmuhl agreed that the study was representative of experiences she has heard about in the state.
“I have noticed that school librarians in our districts have been proactive and tried to ensure good communication within their school districts (about book ban attempts),” Schmuhl said.
Hawkes’ study found that of the 16 censorship requests in Ohio from 2021 to 2024, eleven were for “non-removal challenges,” eight resulted in some type of book ban, and three were for “movement of books or other materials.”
According to the researcher, librarians employ “objective criteria” when deciding what materials are age appropriate and relevant for school libraries. The training they receive qualifies them to make inventory decisions and deal with challenges posed by parents, most of which emerged from the study.
The majority of school librarians who responded to Hawkes’ survey had between 11 and 15 years of experience as a director or manager of their current library, and more than 62% had a master’s degree in library science.
“First of all, I wanted people to understand that parents have the right to decide what their children read, and when they read it… they can approach librarians about it,” Hawkes said. “They can’t ban other people’s children’s books.”
For Johnson, returning to the English language does not mean she will avoid the topic of censorship.
“I think I can handle it in public schools with what’s going on right now, regardless of my position,” she said.
The Legislature approved one measure aimed at forcing public libraries to move “inappropriate” materials out of sight of minors, but Governor Mike DeWine vetoed the decision as “impossible”.
It would mandate another bill that is still pending in the Legislature providers of online educational resources that go to public libraries and schools to create safeguards to prevent “inappropriate” content from reaching children’s eyes.
Opponents of the materials say the bill could have unintended consequences by also removing educational materials.
Johnson’s goals in the classroom include helping children continue reading to “prepare them for this really difficult world we’re in,” as well as involving parents in the process.
“We must work together as parents and school communities to ensure children are literate. We know that having books at home and at school at their fingertips is just the beginning of this,” she said.
