A Window, Closed
Withholding intellectual stimulation from poor children is a crime
Renee Olson, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2000
"How could you, in a poor neighborhood, deny children a library?" These are the plaintive words of Aida Rosa, an elementary school principal in Mott Haven, the poorest neighborhood in a troubled part of New York City, the South Bronx. Fact is, it's done all the time. Only 16 out of 103 elementary and middle schools in the South Bronx have certified librarians (high schools are required to have them) and New York Public Library opens its Bronx branches on the weekend for just four hours, on average. And bookstores? Not a chance; there are none. Not that most families here can afford books--nearly half earn less than $15,000 a year.
Despite this, the urge to read in this largely Hispanic neighborhood is as palpable as the need for cool water on a blisteringly hot day. Take Linda, a 10-year-old. She lives next to the Mott Haven Branch Library and she's there all the time, checking out stacks of books. Asked how she finds time to read so much, she says, "I don't like TV." Another girl, Cheyanne, age five, comes to the library every single Monday with her mother. Home sick from school one week, Cheyanne still showed up. She told Children's Librarian Melinda Schroeter that she "didn't want to miss library day."
Jonathan Kozol, the well-known chronicler of the problems facing inner-city schools, writes an angry and passionate piece for us this month about the intense need children have for libraries, especially in poor neighborhoods that are all too familiar with drugs, welfare, and hunger. A society that fails to provide a child with a library is a thief, writes Kozol. It slams a window onto the world that a child may never be able to open in any other way. I find his thinking powerful, and quite sobering.
After you read "An Unequal Education", I recommend that you read Kozol's new book, Ordinary Resurrections (Crown). In it, you'll meet one of the strongest supporters of libraries in the South Bronx, Rosa, the determined principal of Mott Haven's P.S. 30. I visited Miss Rosa--as everyone calls this 30-year veteran of the New York City public schools--in April and found a literature-rich environment, the result of a number of grants. Fifth graders in this school, like Diana, Egypt, and Tiffany, read to third graders and, instead of celebrating Halloween, the entire school dresses up as characters from books. The library is run by a former classroom teacher, Maria Rodriguez, who does not cover teacher prep periods, an anomaly in her district. Rodriguez and Milagros Morales, her part-time paid (albeit poorly) parent staffer, have been through library training and hope to go to library school. "We're going to try and do it on the Internet," says Rodriguez.
Several blocks west of P.S. 30 sits the Mott Haven Branch Library--Linda's library--a century-old Carnegie building with beautiful woodwork that is currently being renovated. On another bright note, funding for youth services materials here has gotten better over the last few years, says Bronx Children's Specialist Danita Nichols, who oversees children's services in the borough. "The main problem is not lack of funding, but lack of staff," says Nichols. "It's harder to get staff in neighborhoods not considered prime."
The inequities between this community and a middle-class suburb are so stark and so amoral that they threaten to make us feel helpless. But programs like New York City's Astor Center for Libraries, a largely privately funded incubator for school libraries, and a current citywide campaign to improve public library salaries are steps in the right direction.
Still, it's true that the problems in the South Bronx run deep, as they do in other impoverished areas of our country. It's unlikely that they will heal entirely through the efforts of caring individuals. Kozol suggests it will take a second civil rights movement to bring equity to a place like the South Bronx, led by someone as powerful as Martin Luther King Jr. He's probably right. For now, life here involves hard choices that children shouldn't have to make. Not long ago, a P.S. 30 student tried to use food stamps to buy himself some books at a book fair. "Put the food stamps away," Miss Rosa told him. She paid for the books herself, saying, "You need those for food."
Another window, nearly closed.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
