Title is a tad bit misleading, I highly doubt I'll be posting daily in this. Nonetheless, I decided to stop filling my other books with news articles and such so I've created this one. In this book I'll be sharing articles, stories, and sometimes pi...
It’s a recent Monday in San Bernardino and Allred Children’s Center and Lytle Creek Elementary School have just let out for the day.
As the school buses lining South K Street fill up, children with energy to burn cross the street.
At Lytle Creek Park, they pass a mini library with no books.
In the two years since Cal State San Bernardino students installed a Little Free Library just outside the playground area, the books have vanished. The door has been ripped off the hinges and taggers have left their marks on the birdhouse-like box, marring its indistinguishable Cal State blue coat of paint.
A mini library once accessible to all now has nothing to access.
In 2016, Cal State students installed seven Little Free Libraries around town as part of the county’s Vision2Read campaign. The libraries work on the honor system – take a book, leave a book – and purport as a meeting place for the community, especially in the summer.
Of those seven and the libraries opened since, three were empty and in various states of disrepair earlier this week.
“It’s too bad,” said Kim Cook, a supervisor at Veronica’s Home of Mercy, which has a Little Free Library in its courtyard, available exclusively to children in the program. “If ours was out, maybe more readily available to the public, it’d be in bad shape too.”
Like the one at Veronica’s Home of Mercy, Little Free Libraries at Central City Lutheran Mission, the Delmann Heights Community Center, Option House and the Boys and Girls Club are either indoors or inaccessible to the general public – and for good reason.
Matthew Douglas manages the Delmann Heights Community Center in northern San Bernardino and said its little library started outside, but was regularly vandalized, prompting its rehabilitation and relocation.
Now safe from vandals, “our kids love it,” Douglas said. “They use it for their school reading, homework assignments. We keep it decorated very nicely.”
A map of Little Free Libraries is available online.
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This Little Free Library at Kari Gers’ home on 33rd and Leroy in San Bernardino had to be moved back 40 feet to prevent certain students from vandalizing it. (Photo courtesy of Kari Gers)
In San Bernardino, four have been registered, including one at Kari Gers’ house on 33rd and Leroy streets.
The mother and longtime resident opened her little library about three years ago, when the neighborhood library started cutting hours severely. With Parkside Elementary School nearby, “this was a way to have a library in our neighborhood open 24/7,” she said.
“I hoped it provided a spot where people could have access to literature any time they wanted.”
Inspired by Constance Wheeler, who’d previously opened a little library on Pershing Avenue, Gers stocked hers with books for infants, toddlers, teens and adults. But the library became a target for middle school students who would take books and rip them up as they walked down the street, Gers said.
The library even caught fire once, Gers recalled. “Every day it was a battle.”
About a year and a half ago, Gers decided to move the library 40 feet closer to her house. There hasn’t been a problem since, she said.
Bryant Fairley, associate director of community engagement at Cal State, called the vandalism “disappointing” and said the university is working with city staffers and neighborhood associations to relocate the damaged libraries.
“The challenge is not only to keep them filled with books,” he said, “but to identify safe places that make them a good investment.”
Cook, Douglas and Katrina Warfield, a shelter manager at Option House, said Cal State students swap out books at their libraries every couple months. Reading skills and vocabularies among Delmann Heights children have expanded thanks in part to the program, Douglas said.
“That’s the beautiful part about Little Free Libraries,” Fairley said. “They allow you the opportunity to be part of the change. Whether you put one in your lawn or whether you pass a book forward to a library currently existing, it’s a way to support reading and have reading be the adventure we encourage young people to take.”
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I'll bet the stupid worthless thugs who keep robbing and vandalizing them are illiterate twits angry at the world because they flunked kindergarten with their pee brains. And yes that's a deliberate wrong word!
