A Challenge to Library Directors

We've done after-school programming for years - let's do it better

By Brian Kenney, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 11/1/2006

There’s a new acronym among us. It’s OST. It stands for out-of-school time, and it refers to the meaningful programs and services that are provided to children and teens after school, on weekends, and over the summer. While OST has created big challenges for all librarians, it especially affects public librarians.

“Oh, please. Give us a break!” the public librarians who are reading this are no doubt saying. “We’re all about OST—if that’s what you want to call it.” And they’re right. Public librarians practically invented the idea a century ago. Pick up a copy of any good public library’s calendar, and you’ll see plenty of activities targeting the after-school crowd—not to mention the incredible summer reading programs that are offered throughout the country.

But at a recent conference in New York, “Learning in Libraries: A National Call to Action,” sponsored by the Urban Libraries Council (ULC) with support from the Wallace Foundation, I began to think about OST differently. (For more on the conference, visit www.urbanlibraries.org.) Researchers highlighted the importance of out-of-school programs; librarians—funded through the Wallace Foundation’s Learning in Libraries initiative—shared how they had successfully reinvented their OST services; and library leaders provided tips on programs that made a real difference in kids’ lives.

One message heard again and again was that good OST programs need to be intentional. “We can’t take our place at the out-of-school-time table for granted,” says Martín Gómez, ULC’s president. That means it isn’t enough to just create after-school activities because, well, you’ve got 100 kids in your library at 3 p.m. and you’ve got to do something with them.

Embrace OST. Train your entire staff—everyone from paraprofessionals to the adult librarians to the custodian—to make your library welcoming and supportive to OST youth. And make sure you evaluate what you’re trying to achieve. As one speaker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Public librarians also need to work with school librarians and the local community to really make it work. We also need to take a critical look at the services we offer kids and families—and stay relevant by changing with these fast-moving times.

Despite all the buzz about learning, OST isn’t being viewed as a three-hour extension of the school day. It’s also about the “F” word—fun. “We need to understand what chilling looks like,” said Barbara Stripling, director of School Library Services for New York City’s Department of Education. “If chilling looks like reading Web sites, then that’s what we need to make available for kids.”

Most librarians at the conference—like most readers of this editorial, perhaps—were in full agreement. It’s the public library directors who need to listen. Staff members need better tools and skills, while their youth need more space, materials, and computers. As Gómez says, “We cannot view out-of-school-time programming and services as an adjunct to core library services.”

For that to be true, a lot of public library directors will need to take a hard look at their library’s resources and how they’re spent. Maybe it’s time to stop moaning about that seldom-visited reference desk (now quiet because adults are using the Internet) and hire more staff that can serve your major clients: children and teens. Maybe it’s time to take your materials and programming funds and actually align them to your usage statistics.

Maybe it’s time to do a better job of supporting the libraries—and library users—that we already have, and not libraries as we wish they might be.

bkenney@reedbusiness.com

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