Multitype Librarian

A newspaper reported last week that the Homework Center is closing in a neighborhood where many at-risk kids live. The help center was a partnership between the housing authority and school district, who somehow managed to run this service, which was open 2 days a week, on $13,000 a year. The news story told about the end-of-year party that marked the end of this one-room place which has become a neighborhood center for children to come to for the past 13 years. One young man, an immigrant from Laos, started coming to the Center when he was 4 years old. He got help with his homework, became a tutor, and is now graduating from high school.

Another help center in the city closed 6 months ago. According to the article, the closings are due to lack of funding. A tutor at the center was quoted: “”It’s really sad, if you want to know the truth. It’s very sad. It’s become a community center for this housing area, actually.”

The story has haunted me for the past 5 days since I read it. What will become of the kids who got help with their homework there? Without the caring tutoring of the Homework Center, how many will ultimately fail and drop out of school – possibly ending up in trouble and incarcerated. The $13,000 a year pales in comparison to the cost of lost lives, not to mention the cost of incarceration. According to a Bureau of Justice report on State Prison Expenditures 2001, Minnesota spent $37,000 per year for each of the 6,514 inmates in state prisons in that year. And the number of persons in confinement has increased, as evidenced by recent reports of counties who are building new, larger jails. Jurisdictions who are unable to house all their prisoners are paying anywhere from $55 to $85 a day to other counties or states who so far have beds available in their jails or correctional facilities. Seems to me that funding the Homework Center is a bargain at twice this year’s cost.

I hope that our city will find a way to continue these neighborhood education centers – by providing adequate funds to organizations who are well positioned to work in neighborhoods. What a great place for an expanded community center partnership that might include a satellite library in these neighborhoods where at-risk kids and their families live. If we want to keep any child from being left behind we need after school programs, pre-K literacy, and homework help in the neighborhood where the kid lives.

Let us not forget

Stumbled accidentally on a notable blog, Deb’s Lunch. . . and dinner and breakfast too, about one of my favorite subjects – cooking – from Deb Shapiro, faculty member of UW-Madison Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Beautiful pictures!

Incidentally, looking for a Bed ‘n Breakfast in the Black Hills – check out The Anchorage, owned by Lin (& Jim) Gogolin, another great librarian cook.

Looks like The Christian Science Monitor has once again raised the perennial question of library fines – or late fees. They even have a survey, asking the opinion of readers: “Should library fines be abolished?” As of this writing, out of 238 votes, 168 said “No. Fines help to keep borrowers in line and can be a needed source of income for small towns.” And 70 said “Yes. Late fees are more trouble than they’re worth, and they cast libraries in a negative light.”

While I realize that some libraries believe they receive considerable income from the fines collected (csmonitor.com cites the Chicago Public Library having brought in $1.1 million in revenue last year from fines, even without using a collection agency), the article proposes that the cost of good will may be higher, not to mention the undefined labor costs of cash collecting and management.

I previously worked for the Air Force Library Service, where we did not collect fines. Our ultimate threat was collecting for unreturned materials after a generous period of time. Recently, several of our library directors have shared that they are considering or experimenting with elimination of fines. Our Online Schools do not, indeed under state law cannot, charge overdue fees. From anecdotal evidence, it doesn’t appear that there is significant difference in number of lost materials between those libraries that assess fines and those that do not.

The real questions for libraries to ask are: Why is the fine in place? What is the cost of the whole process? What would be the cost of eliminating the fine process? What could be gained in good will if fines were eliminated? or even . . . . How much might library usage be increased if citizens didn’t fear past or future fines?

Anyway, as George says: “Vote early, vote often.” (hurry, poll closes 30 days from start of survey, according to csmonitor.com)

And in the meantime, can we at least call them late fees instead of fines?