Support Our School Libraries
On April 29, 2025, news broke of the decision to eliminate librarians in the Anglophone West School District from the 2025-2026 school budget.
Our libraries are essential to our communities, and without librarians, we create barriers to important learning resources that prepare students for the real world. The children of New Brunswick need unimpeded access to libraries, librarians, and the resources they provide.
We have reached out to the office of our Premier, and ASD-W to express our deep concern, and voice our unwavering support for the school librarians in our province. You can see a copy of this letter below. We also encourage you to use your voice and support our libraries. You can send letters to the Premier, your local MLAs, and ASD-W. Share your concerns (respectfully!) on social media. Reach out to your librarians, and let them know they have your support.
Letter in Support of the ASD-W Librarians
Dear Premier Susan Holt, Superintendent David McTimoney, and the ASD-W Leadership Team,
It is with heavy hearts and great disappointment that we write this letter. On April 29, 2025, news broke of the decision to eliminate librarians in the Anglophone West school district from the 2025-2026 school budget. This decision will have lifelong ramifications for students, our communities, and the province.
We live at a pivotal moment in history when literacy and education play key roles in our ability to survive and thrive as a community. Provincially, nationally, and globally, we observe trends indicating a decline in media literacy and the skills required to digest and assess information properly. Consequently, we are witnessing a rise in rhetoric, values, and beliefs that are harmful to marginalized and minority groups.
In 2024, we launched Fablefern Bookshop on the foundation that literacy plays a key role in the development of young people and the communities in which they live. We strive to serve as a bridge between free and accessible resources, such as public and school libraries, and big box retailers, which are often financially inaccessible. We aim to serve our community as best we can through accessibility, diversity, sustainability, and imagination, four principles that allow people of all ages to develop and grow into empathetic, creative, and dedicated community leaders.
Fablefern Bookshop would not exist without the librarians and educators who were foundational to our childhood development. Whether we went to the public library each week as a family for story time or borrowed countless novels from the school library, the people in those spaces helped instill our love of learning, making it possible for three women to take a risk as entrepreneurs. It is on the shoulders of librarians that we become a productive and compassionate society.
In a time when the cost-of-living crisis is forcing families to make incredibly difficult choices, libraries and the librarians who manage them play an integral role in the lives of young people; in their development into adulthood, and in their ability to make educated decisions about their futures. Without librarians, libraries become relics of our past. They lose the ability to be safe places for kids to discover themselves. They become spaces for storage because no one is there to fight for their importance. They get boarded up, leaving behind a deep and unfilled hole in the education of our students and the future of our province.
We implore you to reconsider these rash cuts. This decision will ripple through generations by building barriers to accessing the tools and resources needed to fuel our desire to learn.
In the words of R. David Lankes, award-winning professor at the University of South Carolina, “bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities.”
We cannot afford to give our future generations access to bad libraries only.
Sincerely,
Emily Dean, Elizabeth Stockall, Hayden Corcoran
Fablefern Bookshop, Saint John, NB