Week 7 Post

This week at the Indian Prairie Public Library had me reliving my days of teen angst. No one understands you, your body is going through changes, school is hard...huh...the same can all be said for my 40's as well. Weird. 

The IPPL's Programming and Outreach team provides the staffing for the desk that is in the midst of it all: Tiny Town, the Mid-Kid Lounge, and the Teen Zone. Normally this desk just deals with answering questions from patrons and providing basic circulation services.  But over the last week, multiple patrons were asked to leave due to behavior issues, a higher-than-normal number of incident reports were filed, and our giant pencil was stolen. All of these were due to our teen patrons. I know A LOT of these teens pretty well. My full time job is across the street at their high school. They are NOT bad kids, just for some reason, they are really squirelly right now. Maybe there was a full moon?  I don't know. But what I do know is that now there are going to be discussions regarding if changes need to be made. Do we give out too many snacks?  Is the furniture too comfortable?  What can we do to help our impressionable patrons remember how to act in a shared space?

YALSA's core value of Accountability ensures that both the library and the patrons need to be responsible for behavior.  We need to model and enforce what we expect of our patrons and they need to be able to rise to the occasion.  The Compassion core value helps to counter-balance that, reminding us that we can't know eveyone's full story and to always lead with grace towards our patrons. 

Whatever the changes we make are, I hope that they will inform our practices in a way that we can help our teen patrons and be a refuge from their own teenage angst, because trust me, I GET IT. 

Comments

  1. GabrielOctober 15, 2024 at 10:04 AM

    It's true what you write of YALSA. Modeling behavior may be hard, but enforcement is more complex. What strategies did you use?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lissa in the LibraryOctober 20, 2024 at 7:57 PM

      Warnings are big for us, and if you accrue too many you will be asked to leave for the rest of the day. The pencil thief will likely receive a ban if a similar event occurs in the future.

      Delete

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