A library for all

We’ve all had the experience while at one of our wonderful libraries. Middle school kids parked at the library after school and acting out, being disruptive or ornery. A person without a home taking advantage of the heat or the cooling of the library and addressing hygiene beyond a hand wash in the restroom.

It can be frustrating, unsettling for both visitors and staff who are at the library for more standard reasons of borrowing a book, studying or just enjoying the quiet.

To this point the Oak Park Public Library has addressed these chronic concerns with in-house security or beat police officers. It hasn’t been adequate in the view of the library’s board and administration which last week announced the first time hiring of a social worker. 

We admire this effort and we applaud the choice of a person with direct Oak Park experience in the fine art of intervention. This one-on-one approach is the necessary response to the real people with complex needs who spend time at the library.

Well over a decade ago when Oak Park Township Youth Services hired the first “interventionists” to work with teens on the verge of trouble, we became admirers of the hands-on, meet them in Scoville Park, sit with families at the dining room table approach.

One of the many strengths of that township initiative was the financial buy-in of every local taxing body in its success. Parks and schools and villages all paid their annual “tithe” to fund these positions and beyond that they allowed their resources and those of local non-profits to be threaded into the solutions developed for each individual.

While the library has adequate funding for this position, the success of this program will be in the willingness of other entities to step up and problem solve. The library will continue to work with first-rate nonprofits, including Housing Forward and Prevail. It needs help from the middle and high schools, from youth focused non-profits who can offer additional after school options.

Perhaps most important, the library needs its patrons and supporters to allow their views of the public library to widen out some. Between the mythology that simple “shushing” was ever adequate and the perception that the library has gone to hell in a handbasket, there is a more vibrant, more unexpected, sometimes more noisy library growing in our midst.

Good for the library to take this bold and embracing step.