How a Local Library is Failing Their Kids

 
As the Executive Director of a Texas nonprofit, I had the privilege of supplying financially-disadvantaged students with mostly laptop computers for their home. Over the span of our organization's activity, we placed 2278 computers and laptops into the homes of local kids whose family could not afford a computer.

I became active in many of these children's lives, as my organization provided support for their computers for the student's entire academic career. Years of support. We even replaced these machines with upgraded models if and when the child was accepted into college. It stands to reason we developed close relationships with these kids and their parents.

 While we did provide these students a computer, it was beyond our financial capability to provide them with internet access. Many of these kids took after school and weekend jobs to pay for internet access. Unfortunately, this option wasn't available to most of these kids.

 

Many of these families were run by single parents, the majority of those parents being single moms. Mom would find it necessary to come home as soon as possible in order to take their child (or children) to the library, where they could make use of the internet to do research and complete homework assignments. When libraries were not near or open, some moms would park their cars in front of a business with open internet access and the child completed their homework in the car itself. We even met with the local school boards and persuaded them to allow students without printer access to turn in their assignments on thumb drives.

Moms run the world by the way.

 Even in the small town of Taylor Texas where we were headquartered, the local library was open six days of the week, to include Saturdays. Taylor is a small town of fifteen thousand residents, but even with a population this low, the Library was able to remain open during the hours needed for local kids to work.   See the hours for yourself below. Oh, and as an aside, as of the last census, Taylor is in the top 10 percent of impoverished citizens, per capita; in Texas.

Tue    9 AM–6 PM
Wed    9 AM–6 PM
Thu    9 AM–8 PM
Fri    9 AM–6 PM
Sat    9 AM–2 PM
Sun    Closed
Mon    9 AM–8 PM

Uh, you would think this model is followed by many small towns and villages. Many are, but some are not.

Let's talk about the Llano County, TX Library System, which consists of 3 branches. Let's look at their hours of operation.

HOURS
Llano Library
Monday – Friday 9:00 – 5:30

Let's compare and contrast these hours. Now, Llano is a much smaller town (about 3500 give or take), maybe a fifth the size of Taylor's population, so maybe it's a funding issue. Really? 

Recently the Llano County library had their funding slashed by $150.000.00. Funny that. That's close to the amount the county had to pay said attorney in a pending lawsuit. You can read the sordid details of that lawsuit by following the preceding link. I'm not personally involved in the politics of this, but someone extremely close to me is, and she says this stinks like three-day-old fish.

But politics aside, it seems like the financially-disadvantaged kids in and around Llano are terribly underserved here...and I'm being polite with the underserved part. Most of these kids in Llano come from comfortable-to-do families and internet access isn't an issue, but there are a lot of kids not so fortunate. Some of these kids live in areas underserved by broadband services. As a person living in an Internet Black Hole, I can sympathize. Ya might think opening the Llano Library on Saturday for four hours might be a good idea.

"The Friends of the Llano Library" obviously does not have the interests of those kids at heart, since they have some say so with the library budget. Apparently, they also have sway with what books are "inappropriate" for children. Like having the word "butt" in it. Yeah...butt.

Go figure.

Let's just hope they don't aim their book banning ire at Shakespeare. Ol' William didn't mind getting just a tad spicy. Just sayin'.

Yours Wryly