Got an email from Julia Griswold from the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council who shared a link to this article in today’s Los Angeles Times that talks about the recent cuts in service to the L.A. Public Library system affecting youth patrons, while their lives face other distractions, such as midnight video game launch events.
Aside from the article’s opening setting being the Cahuenga Branch Library (and the article itself correctly referring to its neighborhood as “East Hollywood” – Woo-Hoo!), the most awesome thing in the article was a quote from a 17-year old student named Jessica Ramirez who said, “Closed? On a school day? That sucks!”
That was perhaps the best quote printed to sum up the recent cuts to the LAPL, which closed its branches on Mondays.
Jie Ren, the Cahuenga Branch’s Senior Librarian, told me that since the Monday hours have been nixed, their heaviest days are now Saturdays and Tuesdays. Tuesdays are the new Mondays, figuratively speaking.
Libraries, in addition to being educational resources to a community, also function as community centers and spaces. I should know — The concept of a neighborhood council was born in the Cahuenga Library, during meetings of a now-defunct group I formed in 1996 called the “East Hollywood Community Association.”
They met on the first Monday of the month.
I shudder to think if these budget cuts existed in an earlier time, the course of history might have changed (Well, maybe only slightly, I probably would have found a way to meet on a different night). But still, with libraries being used for everything from art classes to origami club meetings to workshops to all sorts of other uses, these cuts would deny someone else a chance to start something positive in our community.
Read the article: Library cuts, school-night Xbox launches hurt students
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