New Jersey is rewriting how it funds schools. This is the moment.

School Librarians are cut locally, in a single budget vote, usually with very little notice. Whether they come back depends on Trenton. You can act in both places, and it starts with two signatures.

Sign the petitions

Goes to your Board of Education and Superintendent

Your district’s petition

Signatures from inside the district are what carry weight with a Board of Education. Find your district’s petition and share it with other parents in your schools.

Find your district’s petition

Goes to Trenton

The statewide petition

Supports the four statewide asks below. The signature count is what gets cited in the funding-formula debate, and signatures from a legislator’s own district carry the most weight.

Sign the statewide petition

They do different work and neither substitutes for the other. Sign both.

Then pick where to act

Each has six concrete steps, with templates for the letters, emails and public comments.

In your own district

Where a parent has the most leverage. Montclair and Union Township have moved to eliminate School Librarians districtwide, and cuts are reaching historically well-resourced districts.

  • First, find out where your district stands: staffing, shared positions, library hours and budget.
  • Sign and share your district’s petition
  • Raise it with your PTA, PTO and SEPAC
  • Email or speak to your Superintendent
  • Speak at a Board of Education meeting, before the budget vote
  • Write to your local paper
  • Join the campaign in your district
Act in your district

Statewide

The funding formula is being revised now. This is the moment a School Library Program can be written into what a thorough and efficient education includes.

  • Sign the statewide petition
  • Bring your PTA or PTO with you
  • Write to your State Senator and Assembly members
  • Write to the Governor and the Commissioner of Education
  • Contact the State Board of Education
  • Write an op-ed
Act statewide

What we are asking the Legislature for

Four asks in two parts: someone responsible for School Library Programs, and funding that actually reaches them.

Standards and structure

1

An Office of School Library Programs

A New Jersey office responsible for School Library programming statewide: development, execution and accountability. Today no office owns it.

2

School Library Teaching and Learning Program Standards

Developed with NJASL, built on AASL National School Library Standards and IFLA Global Standards, alongside the NJ Student Learning Standards.

Funding that reaches the library

3

An earmarked School Library Program appropriation

A protected line, modeled on the municipal library appropriation, that cannot be reallocated once adopted, sized at 1.0–1.5% of the general fund.

4

Shared services and a State Aid category

Certified School Librarians shared across small districts or run at county level, and State Aid for districts that can’t fund a program from their own tax levy.

New Jersey already decided School Librarians are part of a thorough and efficient education and priced them into the base cost. An Office gives that requirement an owner. Standards give it a definition. An earmarked appropriation gives it a budget that survives budget cuts. Without all three, New Jerseyans keep paying for a service some of their children never receive.

Everything you need to speak up

Templates

Public comment scripts and letters to a superintendent, board, legislator, the Governor and the Commissioner.

Handouts

The one-page parent handout and the legislative handout, ready to print.

Where your district stands

Staffing and spending for all 535 operating districts. Look yours up before you speak.

Talking points

Responses to what you’re most likely to hear, from “it’s a nice to have” to “we can’t afford it.”

Why now and not next year

The funding formula is openNew Jersey is rewriting how it funds schools, and recommendations go to the Legislature.
Reading keeps fallingReading scores have been declining since 2012 as screen time displaces reading.
A deadline is comingDistricts must implement first-in-the-nation K–12 information literacy standards by September 2027.
The cuts are ongoingNew Jersey has cut more than 30% of its School Librarians since 2010.

Join our team

The campaign needs parents in every county: collecting signatures, tracking district budgets, watching board agendas and turning people out at meetings.

Sign up

Once you’ve signed, the most useful thing you can do is send this page to one other parent in your district.

Every figure on this page is sourced at schoolsneedlibrarians.com/sources.