LA County Trailblazer

Penny Markey, the recipient of this year's Grolier Award for her significant contributions to young readers, is a true visionary. In the early 1990s, at a time when only a handful of libraries were offering in-house sessions to the disposable-diaper crowd, Markey was already taking things one step further. As the County of Los Angeles Public Library's youth services coordinator, she created a revolutionary early-reading program called "Begin at the Beginning with Books." The program took the then-novel approach of dispatching librarians to nearby health clinics, where they taught new and expectant mothers how to share the love of books with their newborns. The innovative program was so successful that it inspired similar offshoots nationwide, including "Born to Read," a project managed by the Association for Library Service to Children. When a panel of distinguished judges was later asked to select people who were doing remarkable work with children for a 1996 PBS television special entitled Searching for Heroes, Markey and her forward-thinking program were among the handful that were featured.

These days, the energetic Markey is working with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services to get library cards into the hands of more foster children. Markey's plan, of course, includes an unusual twist: the cards come with no strings attached—and their users are exempt from fines. A pilot project is now under way. Though the plan seems like an obvious, straightforward way to help a group of underserved kids, the red tape in California can be overwhelming. Not surprisingly, Markey is undeterred and, judging from her past record, she's almost certain to accomplish her latest mission.

Although Markey refuses to see herself as a hero, the PBS special offered at least one indisputable insight: "In this world of increasing despair, it is uplifting to hear stories of people like Penny, people who have truly made a difference." I spoke to Markey about her ongoing commitment to community-outreach programs and her zeal for the profession.

Begin at the Beginning with Books has been a model program for the nation. How did it come about?

I was doing a session for incarcerated pregnant women at Sybil Brand Institute, the women's prison in Los Angeles County. I had just had my son, less than a year earlier. This is 18 or 19 years ago. Honest to God, I did not know what to talk to those women about. I went in and the gates clanked behind me. They took me into a meeting room, and there were about 25 pregnant women or new mothers.

What did you say?

I asked each of them, "What do you want for your new babies?" They wanted their babies to be smarter than they were. They wanted their children to have a good life. They wanted their children to have an education. They wanted their children to be healthy. They wanted their children to be able to read. I learned in that moment that they wanted the same thing for their babies, as I wanted for mine. And that planted the seeds for Begin at the Beginning with Books.

After we went around the room, I read them stories, and they were delighted. They were having such a good time; you could see the joy in their faces. I made the point that wouldn't it be fun to do this with your own babies? What do you think this would do if you shared books with your children the way I'm sharing books and stories and nursery rhymes with you today? It was like bingo in their heads. They could see that there was an attachment there that they could make with their babies in order to prepare them to be more successful in school.

How did you launch the program?

I found a colleague, Floretta Taylor, who felt as strongly about early literacy as I did. She was in the Los Angeles County health department. It took us two years to find money to actually create the program and hire a staff, which we found to be the sustaining piece. We needed to have a staff that ultimately went into the prenatal clinics and the low-income areas of Los Angeles County. We started with five pilot sites. And we created a curriculum where library staff would go in and explain to the mothers the importance of reading to their children, bring them library resources and videos, and show them how to deal with crying babies and with nutrition. It was wonderful.

The program was federally funded for two years. Then we got private funding through foundations for a number of years and since then, we've absorbed it into the county library system. Right now we're on hiatus, doing a study to try to revitalize the program, to see how it has changed in the 10 years that we've had it.

It's remarkable that you've been able to accomplish so much in a state that has often been criticized for not adequately funding its public libraries and schools. What have you learned?

It has been a challenge. I've been coordinator of these services since 1980. So my whole tenure with the county has been one of ups and downs in terms of our internal funding. I think that we have learned to make the best of what we have—to make lemonade. We have continually sought community support. We learned early on that children's services are in the heart and soul of the people in our communities and they are very supportive. We have sought partnerships in every way that we could come up with to seek funding for special programs.

It has been a challenge, seeking funding. We've gotten a lot of grant programs through the years. We are always beating the bushes for new partnerships to assist us. Oftentimes we can't necessarily undertake a huge program ourselves, but we can be a partner and a player with what else is going on in our community. So we try to be visible.

That reminds me of a wonderful summer program that you initiated between the library and local cultural organizations.

The program you're talking about was a back-to-school registration drive; it was called ESP, the Educational Success Partnership program. We identified about 30 educational and cultural venues in Los Angeles County and the surrounding areas, such as museums and the zoo, and we partnered with them. They provided us with either free or reduced-rate entry fees and we created a booklet. If a child had a library card or would get a library card, the parent could bring the child to the library and get a passport to enable them to visit all these venues at reduced rates or for free.

We were afraid that the passport itself might not be a big enough draw in certain communities where people feel that transportation is an issue or that museums and that kind of thing are for people with education or people with money. So we added a bonus that when they came to the library for their passport, we would give them a packet of school supplies. This was early in September, as the children were just getting back into school. The response was phenomenal.

During a three-week period in September, we distributed some 25,000 of these passports throughout our service area. We did the program for two years. It was highly labor intensive, both administrating and putting the program itself together and, as you can see, we were sort of mobbed. This was about five years ago. We still get questions about it and are asked if we're going to do it again. Perhaps we will.

Over the years, you've been passionate about recruiting new librarians. Would you talk a little about that?

I'm trying a new thing now that's kind of fun, with the recruitment issues that face librarianship in general, and children's librarianship in particular. For the last two years we have gotten a Library Services and Technology grant where basically we are recruiting college students, sophomores and up, who state an interest in working in education or working with children. We are recruiting them to be summer interns and working with our children's librarians that we have trained as mentors to introduce young people to the field of librarianship.

It has just been incredible working with the interns. We hired 16 last summer, and one of them that we know of has gone on to library school. That's not too bad. We have 16 more that are starting this year. As I tell them when I do my introduction, this is our hidden agenda, to encourage you to become librarians. But I feel that if we can persuade them of the importance of libraries and have them understand what it is that we're trying to do to improve the lives of the children in our community, we've won—even if they don't become a children's librarian or a teacher.

Do you personally have any special hopes or dreams for the future of libraries, especially for children's services?

I hope that we continue to be viable. I think we have to begin very strongly to start gathering data, to be able to prove the important work that we are doing. I think we need to invest in longitudinal studies that enable us to show how the work that we do has ongoing benefits for the children and families that we work with. I hope, and I see, that collaborations and partnerships are the wave of the future. The librarian as an advocate for children, I hope, will become a stronger part of what we do. And I do hope there's stable funding.

What can librarians do to get adequate funding?

You have to be very political; you have to be very passionate; and you have to have your information at hand to be able to articulate what is important about libraries and why we need them. It's very hard to persuade policy makers that quality-of-life services need to be funded to keep our families and children strong, but librarians have a very large advocacy role to play in that arena. We can't wait.