Boston Public Wins Highsmith Award
SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 5/12/2008 11:38:00 AM
Imagine a homework assistance mentoring program that's available on weekends and has older kids helping younger kids through the ups and downs of reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as school's thornier social issues.
That describes the Boston Public Library's Homework Assistance Mentoring Program (HAP), winner of the 2008 Urban Libraries Council (ULC) Highsmith Award of Excellence. The award honors North America's best library youth programming and carries a cash prize of $1,000.
ULC is a membership organization of North America's premier public library systems and the corporations that serve them.
The staff for HAP, which runs after school and on Saturdays in the Central Library and its 27 branches, estimates that the program will serve more than 700 students in 11,900 mentoring sessions this year. That's important to ULC. "Targeted service to youth is essential to being a dynamic urban library," says Martín Gómez, the organization's president.
Beth Dempsey, a spokesperson for ULC, adds that the award's presenters saw two things in particular that set Boston Public's HAP program apart. One, is its mentoring component. "They bring in high school kids," Dempsey explains. "It's not just 'homework'; it's the struggles of middle school. It's social mentoring, too."
The second is the participation of students in HAP. "It's not 'libraries planning for kids.' It's kids planning for kids," Dempsey says. "The whole program was developed in conjunction with kids."
HAP is a valued library program, Boston Public's President Bernard Margolis, says. According to a Massachusetts Department of Education projection, 28 percent of Boston's high school class of 2008 will have dropped out before graduation.
