Pretty Space

The first thing you’ll notice about the library at P.S. 246 in the Bronx is its light. Despite the media center’s basement location, its reading room is big, bright, and welcoming, with fluorescent light filtering through whimsical fiberglass clouds and recessed light emanating from inside the many maple bookcases.

On their top shelves, librarian Karen Leo has placed playful things—seashells, toy dinosaurs, a cloth gingerbread man—to signal the book categories shelved below. On the walls are murals made from collages of items that the K–6 school’s students have provided—a pinwheel, a bolt of cloth, a Hello Kitty doll. The photographed collages are packed with personality. So are the two alcoves, furnished with sofas and stuffed animals. And then there’s the technology: four Mac desktop computers and 10 laptops ready for action at the pink, blue, and white student worktables. The coolest feature? A “presentation theater” at one end of the library’s 80-by-25-foot space. It comes complete with a stage, kid-sized seats, and a U-shaped curtain, which, at the push of a button, creates a private space for viewing movies.

This library is so enticing that you’d scarcely imagine it’s in one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. Equally surprising is that just five years ago none of this existed. But then the Robin Hood Foundation came calling. The New York-based nonprofit organization, along with its corporate and children’s publishing partners, fights poverty in the city by, among other initiatives, building state-of-the-art school libraries and stocking them with books, in low-income, low-academic-achieving schools. So far, 31 such libraries have been completed.

P.S. 246 is one of them. But, more importantly, this spectacular gift implied a not-unwelcome challenge. As Leo put it, “We had to really use the space efficiently, get the library up and running, and use the resources to our fullest capacity.”

In short, this new library had to become more than just a pretty space: It had to engage the school’s 800 mostly impoverished, at-risk children, 92 percent of whom receive free lunch, and the majority of whom have scored below grade level on reading tests for years.

“Conditions were awful and crowded,” Leo says of the school’s “before” picture of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Then P.S. 246’s technology teacher, Leo squeezed four bookcases (stocked with nonfiction, noncirculating titles available only to students in grades four through six) into her tiny computer lab. Because most state library funding went to classroom libraries, Leo was left with just $1,000 to spend annually. So she pursued corporate donations to build a real library. But the corporations said no, hesitant possibly because of the school’s century-old structure and its lack of an auditorium or gym.

Then came the call from Robin Hood in May 2002, and P.S. 246’s life changed faster than a lottery winner’s. In addition to receiving free architectural and construction services and materials—the amount of which Robin Hood did not disclose—the library also was given a “starter set” of 10,000 books, since augmented to 20,000 volumes. Robin Hood’s gift also paid Leo’s tuition for an MLIS from Syracuse University, and the city education department agreed to double the school’s per-pupil state library funding for five years.

None of which implied that the library could be a passive recipient: even as Leo pursued certification, she worked to ensure success. First, the collection needed to be overhauled: P.S. 246 is 80 percent Hispanic, with 34 percent English-language learners, and the beginning books were nearly all in English. Robin Hood graciously secured a $30,000 Deutsche Bank gift for bilingual books. Fine-tuning her collection further, Leo surveyed teachers, even children for their “wish lists.” Then a library advisory team completed an action plan focusing on efficiency, connecting the library with classroom learning, and on details like circulation. “When the children came in, we were very precise in letting them know how the library would be used,” Leo says.

During the construction phase, she circulated books by cart. But once the new space opened in September 2004, she felt relief at finally having a home for the existing Reading Buddy program, and Reading First, a federal program that funds reading coaches. Another popular program, TIGER (Together in Getting Everyone Reading) gets P.S. 246’s students reading about those fabulous creatures, then buses the kids to the nearby Bronx Zoo to see the real thing.

Wanting more, Robin Hood funded BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), which builds self-esteem; and All Kinds of Minds, which pays steep testing fees to determine challenged learners’ strengths and weaknesses.

The library also became an arts center: during SLJ’s visit, kindergartners acted out the “Three Pigs” story, and teachers trained for the annual poetry slam, in which upperclassmen compete with other schools via teleconferenced performances of their poems.

Leo also greased the wheels by announcing which students checked out the 1,000th and 2,000th books. “Boy did they race down to this library to keep borrowing books! It was cute,” Leo laughs. She conducted class orientations and ensured, as Robin Hood requires, that teachers partnered with the library for research, not just class drop-offs. Other requirements instituted were flexible scheduling, summer hours, open access to small groups of students two periods a day, and a welcome mat for parents who can browse their own reading section.

Predictably, P.S. 246’s library became a hit—and not just with the kids. “A room like this is so conducive to wanting to read,” observes reading coach Abby Reuben. “I was awestruck; I never imagined I’d see a library like that outside suburban schools,” says fourth-grade teacher Theresa Flannery.

Indeed the room is inviting, with quiet reading corners and those wall collages and hanging kites (“Costco,” Leo whispers conspiratorially). The library is also well-stocked. Health teacher Cathy Pennacchia credits the collection for helping students with tough topics like HIV/AIDS. Principal Beverly Miller, who started at P.S. 246 in 2004, calls the library “the enticement” for accepting her job. Sure she’s joking, but the library did overlap years when school reading test scores rose significantly.

Good news, but the question begs, what happens when Robin Hood’s five-year support runs out two years hence? Will the library remain vital—or devolve into just a pretty space?

Leo voices her determination to apply for grants and reach out to new partners, as she’s just done with the Bronx Library Center (the borough’s spiffy new central library that opened last year), planning a study of Bronx artists and a student exhibition. Still, Leo feels the crunch. “A library,” she says, “was a big wonderful gift, a surprise. Now that we have it, where do we go from here?” Then she answers her own question: “Money comes and goes, but knowledge is forever.”