Tracy Novick: Bringing Library Access Back to Children

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Saturday, March 10, 2012

Tracy Novick, GoLocalWorcester Education Contributor

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
--Jorge Luis Borges

One summer when I was in elementary school, I read through the entire biography section in the children's room of our town library, from Louisa May Alcott to Babe Didrikson Zaharias . I was once punished in sixth grade by having my school library privileges taken away for a month.

Count me as a fan.

I have friends who were introduced to their future careers through library books, who escaped recess bullies through volunteering to shelve books, who learned of places and concepts and people far beyond their daily experiences through libraries they spent time in as children.

As I said, I'm a fan.

I'm thus incredibly pleased that the city of Worcester this spring will put part of its library on wheels with the new bookmobile sponsored by the College of the Holy Cross. With one main branch and two local branches, the Worcester Public Library reaches some of the city, but many people have difficulty in getting to a branch. Too many kids never get to one of the libraries. Now the library will come to them. More of the city will be able to read and read and read.

This is great progress, but it isn't enough.

One of the great gaps between children who grow up poor and children who don't is access to books. If your family doesn't have much money, books usually come far down the list on things to buy. According to the Reading is Fundamental organization, nearly two-thirds of low-income families own no books. Yet as demonstrated time and again, continued free access to books can significantly reduce the effect of poverty on student achievement. It's also been demonstrated that access specifically to libraries improves student achievement (in many ways, not just test scores).

And as the great builder of libraries Andrew Carnegie knew, it isn't just about doing well in school:

                                               There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free
                                               Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office,
                                               nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.

We must, therefore, keep libraries readily available to all, but especially to our children.

We are rebuilding from two decades that nearly leveled the Worcester school library system. Between the end of school in the spring of 1990 and the opening of school that fall, the Worcester Public Schools cut school library positions from 27 to 9. This eliminated all elementary librarian positions. It is only through effort, and periodic budget battles, that we have kept librarians at all of the secondary schools. We do not have a line item for library purchases; all purchases are through fundraising or through the supply budget of the schools.

It is a credit to the librarians we do have and to two decades of devoted volunteers that we have the library services across the city schools. Many elementary schools do have organized libraries with regular times for classes to come, with books that are neatly reshelved and properly checked out. We have libraries that get new books each year. A few of our elementary libraries--again, largely through volunteer effort—even have made the switch to an electronic card catalog and check-out system, something they share with the secondary schools.

Last year, we on the school committee added the first elementary librarians back to the system in decades: we have a single librarian shared between Union Hill and Chandler Elementary, our first two Level 4 schools. Appreciating all of the above research on the importance of regular and easy access to books for children who may not naturally have that, we have worked to get that access back to our students who need it most.

There's a long way to go yet to get real library access back to all of our kids in Worcester. If we want our kids to have not only an escape for an afternoon, but a real escape from the grinding of poverty, properly equipped and staffed libraries must be a part of the answer. 

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