The Best Little Library in Texas

Don't let that dissuade you. Keep going straight: past the EZ Pawn shop, specializing in jewelry and loans. Past the flapping plastic flags of Longhorn Auto Sales. Past the Austin Baptist Chapel, with bars on its windows and a neon-signed soup kitchen. Past the weedy vacant lot. See that squat, inconspicuous brick building? The one you've blown right by? Do a U-ie: that's the library.

The Henry S. Terrazas Branch Library has the unenviable distinction of occupying Austin's smallest city-owned library building. With its 5,400 square feet of floor space, the structure is so tiny and unprepossessing that until two years ago, many folks in this mostly Hispanic neighborhood did not even know the place existed--which, in hindsight, may not have been a bad thing.

The parents who did know of the branch's existence, says its manager, Elva Garza, were often scared to send their kids there. No way were their sons and daughters hanging out with the homeless men and occasional drunks who were known to frequent the place. The purported drug deals in the back alley also didn't sit well with most parents. And it wasn't solely parents who were put off. Teachers at the Sanchez Elementary School, two short blocks away, were not fans of the library, either: few encouraged their students to drop by after school, and the number of class visits each year could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The only group that truly valued the library was a small cadre of parents that treated the place like their own private day-care center, dumping off their kids, and whizzing away to work. Things were so bad eight years ago, when Garza first arrived, that when she scheduled a storytime, more often that not, no one showed up.

 You wouldn't expect a library like this to be singled out for praise. But that's precisely what has happened. The Terrazas Branch Library is the winner of SLJ's first annual Giant Step Award, which honors the public or school library that has most improved its services to children. (The award also carries a $10,000 prize, compliments of the Gale Group, a cosponsor.)

So, how did this down-on-its-luck library manage to do an about-face?

Gus Garcia is credited with planting the seed that led to Terrazas's turnaround. In February 1999, Garcia, then a city councilman, was convinced that most neighborhood parents had no idea what the local library had to offer. He was also concerned that an impending bond vote--which, if approved, would double the library's present size--wouldn't pass. Garcia had reason to worry: Terrazas's circulation figures were anemic and the number of people who walked through its doorway was scant. He scheduled a meeting with Elva Garza and some of the Sanchez School staff. Was there any way, he asked, that the library and the elementary school could work together? Could kids be persuaded to use the Terrazas Branch?

At that meeting, Garza soon discovered that she had three willing accomplices who were eager to attract kids to the local library: Principal Ed Leo, School Librarian Jan Hill, and Parent-Teacher Coordinator Yolanda Maldonado, each a passionate advocate of reading and family literacy. Together, they decided that a survey would be sent home to parents of the school's 478 students. The purpose of the survey was simple: identify what was preventing children from using the local library, and then, explains Garza, remove all the obstacles.

The completed survey revealed, among other things, that many parents wouldn't let their kids use the Terrazas library because they couldn't afford to pay the late-book fines or cover the cost of replacing lost books. In a neighborhood like East Austin, where more than 96 percent of the pupils come from economically disadvantaged families, that kind of logic is hard to refute. The findings also showed that many parents didn't realize that Terrazas offered books in Spanish. And many parents, especially recent immigrants, indicated that they had never visited a library in their entire lives.

Armed with these findings, Garza received permission from the Austin City Council to wipe away existing children's book fines and to institute an amnesty period: any child or teacher who owed the library money could now start over again with a clean slate. As for future fines, penalties on children's materials were reduced from 20 cents a day to a nickel.

Still, one Godzilla-sized obstacle remained. And until it was overcome, Garza and the Sanchez School were powerless to proceed with a plan to kick off a schoolwide library-card sign-up campaign.

Until recently, in order for kids to get an Austin Public Library card, their parents needed to display appropriate identification, say, a valid driver's license, at the library. In East Austin, where undocumented immigrants are common, authorized IDs are often a stumbling block. But an even thornier problem for this community has been U.S. immigration officials, who have been known to crop up in the most unlikely of places--on city buses, in grocery stores--and haul unsuspecting adults away. Small wonder, then, that some parents would rather sit on a rattlesnake than show their face at the local library.

Knowing this, the Terrazas Branch decided to eliminate the ID requirement for parents of schoolchildren. Now, parents would be able to sign library-card applications at home and have their kids return them to the Sanchez School. The school would then verify the parent's address and provide the Terrazas library with an identification number for each student (the same number that is used on a student's report card).

With the ID obstacle out of the way, Garza and the Sanchez staff began an aggressive schoolwide library-card sign-up campaign, sending home registration forms in Spanish and in English. When the campaign first kicked off, in February 1999, the vast majority of students had never been issued a library card. The sign-up campaign was so successful that nine months later, in October, 50 percent of Sanchez's pre-Kindergarten through sixth grade students sported library cards. Even more impressive, 85 percent of those card-carrying kids were actually using them to check out books. As for Terrazas's paltry circulation figures, they soared by 44 percent between March 1999 and March 2000. During that same 12â?"month period, foot traffic in the library more than doubled. Indeed, the strategy of making it a snap for kids to get library cards has worked so well that schools and public libraries throughout the city are now following Terrazas's lead.

It is tempting to think that a heady, four-pronged strategy--instituting a library amnesty period, slashing materials' fines, abolishing standard ID requirements, and establishing a schoolwide library-card sign-up campaign--is responsible for much of Terrazas's newfound success. And in many ways, it is. But if you ask Garza what she sees as the key to the place's resurrection, her answer may surprise you. "Visibility," she says.

The five-foot-one-inch librarian has attended innumerable PTA meetings, back-to-school nights, and local events, such as the neighborhood celebration of DA-a de los NiA±os/DA-a de los Libros, part of a larger, nationwide family literacy event. (The local celebration, which Garza chaired, received an award from the Texas Library Association.) Visibility also means that Garza, who lives in another neighborhood about 10 minutes from work, has switched churches. She now attends Our Lady of Guadalupe or Cristo Rey Church in East Austin, instead of her former church, much more convenient to home. She's also transferred her seven-year-old daughter Sarah's dance lessons from a dance studio in her own neighborhood to one in East Austin. "I want people to see me in the grocery store and say, 'That's the library lady,'" Garza says. It doesn't take an Einstein to see that this modest, low-key librarian, who grew up 30 miles from here, in a community much like this one, truly cares about the people she serves.

Not to worry.

As soon as the kids pass through Terrazas's glass doors, a transformation takes place. The children suddenly turn into pint-sized Paine Webber analysts, well behaved and businesslike. Maybe it's the way this library is laid out. The first thing a visitor notices is the easy readers, children's books in Spanish, and juvenile fiction. In fact, at first glance, there's not a single grown-up book in sight. There are, of course, adult books, but they've been shuttled off to the side, relegated to the room's far back corner. The unorthodox arrangement is, of course, premeditated; part of Garza's plan to attract kids to the library, and, eventually, through the children, their parents.

Paola Ferate-Soto, the youth librarian who is leading today's storytime, is a chip off her unstoppable boss. Like Garza, Ferate-Soto will do almost anything to get kids hooked on books. This morning, with Halloween on the horizon, she is reading, among other selections, Has abrazado hoy a tu monstruo? (Have You Hugged Your Monster?, Children's Press, 1986). (Approximately 30 percent of Terrazas's collection is in Spanish, and five percent is bilingual, in English and Spanish.) As Ferate-Soto works the room, she's a postmodern version of Carol Burnett, goofy one moment, melodramatically sad the next. The bilingual preschoolers sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor, like little Buddhas, imbibing each word.

"Se te olvido una pagina!"--You forgot one page--protests a boy in a striped shirt, chagrined that the children's librarian has inadvertently skipped part of the beloved book.

Sitting here among these caring adults and ebullient kids, it's hard to believe that not all that long ago, this library didn't have a pulse. Now, teachers routinely visit the library with their classes. Parents and kids don't think twice about using the library after school and on Saturdays. Plus, the bond vote to increase the size of the library has been approved, and Garza and her staff of three full-timers and three part-timers are looking forward to having more legroom by 2003.

"We're thinking of slowing down," Garza will say later, earnestly believing that she and Ferate-Soto will soon begin to scale back their frenetic, 60-hour-a-week work routines. You wonder, of course, who she thinks she's kidding. But there's no point in arguing. It's plain stupid to disagree with a librarian who has already accomplished the impossible.