Closing the Morgan Hill Library on Mondays, beginning Oct. 11,
to balance a teetering budget will not affect the elderly or
mothers with small children as much as students from P.A. Walsh
around the corner and St. Catherine Catholic School across the
street.
Closing the Morgan Hill Library on Mondays, beginning Oct. 11, to balance a teetering budget will not affect the elderly or mothers with small children as much as students from P.A. Walsh around the corner and St. Catherine Catholic School across the street.
No one at P.A. Walsh could say how many of their students go to the library after school or what they will do when the students find the doors closed on Oct. 18, nor will they send a note home to parents. Oct. 11 is Columbus Day and a normal library holiday.
St. Catherine Principal Suzanne Rich said she didn’t know either but will be sending a note home.
“We do have extended care here,” Rich said, “but when they get a bit older the kids don’t want to go there.”
Children’s Program Librarian Rosanne Macek said the library staff will have flyers announcing the new hours soon and that they will try strenuously to contact all parents of children who use the library every day.
City Librarian Nancy Howe is away on vacation but Macek said Friday that she hasn’t had many comments from library users because most people have not heard. Deputy County Librarian, former Morgan Hill City Librarian and resident Sarah Flowers said her office would be contacting the school district to distribute a county library-prepared flyer to students.
Most affected could be the many students who visit the library every day.
“We get an average of about 1,000 visits a day,” Macek said, “and a conservative estimate is that 400 of them are school-aged children.”
Students as young as seven or eight come to the library after school to do homework and wait – sometimes for hours – for their parents to pick them up. Some read or use the free computers, others play outside.
Fernanda Sanchez, 8, reading a book by herself in the library Thursday evening, said she didn’t know the library would be closed on Mondays. What will she do?
“Now I just won’t come,” Fernanda said.
Macek said the new hours will be a big change for the staff.
“We feel bad for the community,” Macek said, “but it was the right thing for the board to do.”
A state-implemented budget cut cost the county library system more than 40 percent of its operating budget in 1994. A measure passed that year, scheduled to end in June 2005, established a $33.66 per year, per-single-family parcel tax to support the system. JPA board members attempted in March to pass Measure B to extend funding and raise it to $42 per year, but the vote fell just short of the required two-thirds approval.
Not only did the library treasury lose the additional $7 per year, it also will lose the $33.66. The Joint Powers Authority, the library’s governing board, decided recently that closing one extra day a week would address the $5.3 million budget deficit without painful staff layoffs.
While Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger exempted libraries from sending significant money to the state – thereby saving $2.4 million – other government take aways and the parcel tax failure forced the JPA’s hand.
The Monday closings affect all the county’s libraries, as well as the bookmobile and the Alum Rock and Woodland branches.
www.santaclaracountylib.org/ or 779-3196.
