 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show, whatever you want to call us. You can call us anything. We are here live on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time. However, if you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record all of our shows every week, so you can always go to our website, which I'll show you at the end of today's show, and go there and see all of our archived recordings. We have our recordings, any presentations that people include. We put their links to websites that are mentioned. All of that is available to you after the show. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, presentations, interviews, mini training sessions, book review sessions, basically anything a library related. That's our criteria. If it's library related, we'll have it on the show. Sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations. Sometimes we bring in guest speakers. And that's what we've done this morning. Our topic for today is, as you can see a few of your slides there, meeting the unique needs of teens. And on the line with us is Rachelle McPhillips, who is the young adult librarian at the Columbus, Nebraska Public Library. Hi, Rachelle. Good morning. Good morning. Just a few hours north here of Lincoln. About an hour and a half. About an hour and a half, yeah. Depending on how you drive, yeah. It takes me a little less. Yeah. And if you know where you're going, and yeah. So this is a session that actually was done at our Nebraska Library Co-association and the Nebraska School Librarians Association last fall. And I saw it on the program there and thought it was a very timely topic, good topic, kind of things that people are having issues with or having their own, trying to figure out how to deal with the teens in their libraries. So I invited Rachelle to come on the show. So she's here to share with us what they did at their library. So I'll just hand over to you to take it away. All right. Thank you very much. Well, good morning, everyone who signed in to listen this morning. I hope that you have some good things to take away from this and feel empowered and have some new tools to pull out news in your library. I'll just give you a little bit of background here. I started at Columbus Public Library in April of 2009. There was not an established program for young adults in this library, no recurring crafts or book clubs. We did have a nice collection. We had no space for them to visit, just to kind of sit and visit with each other. And we are just two blocks away from our public middle school that has about 800 students enrolled. So Columbus is also, we have more manufacturing factories here per capita than I think anywhere in Nebraska. I don't quote me on that, but I think I'm right. So we have a lot of people who do shift work and can't flex out of their day to pick their children up from school. So those after school hours for our town, they're really crucial for us to get those kids engaged in some place where there are eyes on them. So that happens to be because we're within such close walking distance, oftentimes the library. And when this started, we knew that we had a lot of, middle schoolers and high schoolers visiting every day. And we just hadn't quite addressed the number that we're coming over. And staff did not feel empowered or equipped to handle a large influx of any age group at that time of day. And before we started addressing these things in earnest, what we'd really done was one staff member would look at the other and say, oh, these kids. And the other one would say, I know, right? And that was the extent. So we had to do something. So I came up with an action plan. And the first part of that plan was to look at what we already had in place. What tools did we have at our disposal? And the first one of those was our behavior and conduct policy. It was sound. It outlined most behaviors that we could predict and gave us some wiggle room for those behaviors that we couldn't predict. It gave us some leeway. I think the word discretion, library staff discretion is in that policy. That policy is available on our website. And I do give you a link to that at the end of the presentation. If you need a policy, I think it's a sound one, a good place to start. And don't reinvent the wheel if you can copy. We also needed to look at our unattended child policy. Was the age we had set the right age? And our policy says you have to be 11 or older to be in the library without another responsible party. And for us, that means another 11-year-old. If you're nine, you can be here with your 11-year-old brother as long as he's keeping track of you. And we decided that was a good age for our community. Any younger than that was too young for us to be comfortable. And if we made it older, we'd be excluding some students who needed to walk over here to wait for rides after school. That's also available on our website. And we keep copies of that policy in English and in Spanish to hand out to patrons who aren't aware of it. So once we looked at our policies and decided, okay, we have some ground to stand on. We needed to talk about our library space. What was our jurisdiction? Particularly outside of the building. And we have public sidewalk on two sides of our building. And then we also have some grassy area. And then we have a walkway from the sidewalk to the front door. And we had a lot of people hanging out outside after school. And we needed to know, could we go outside and say, hey, you have to be quiet or you have to leave? And how far did that extend? And what we found was, of course, our lawn, that little walkway from the door to the sidewalk, that was all ours. But we decided that the public sidewalk that wasn't really our jurisdiction, we'd pretend. And as long as the patron will pretend with us, we can enforce our rules that far outside of our building. And of course, and we'll talk about this in more detail later, if they don't want to follow directions from staff in either of those areas, then we have other steps to take, including calling the police. So we defined that. And then we needed to talk to our community. We were getting a lot of complaints. The director was getting weekly complaints from people about the just chaotic atmosphere, the tense feeling when they visited the library after school. We talked to parents by sending home a letter to them, letting them know that, hey, it's great if your child wants to hang out at the library after school. But here are some things that we need you to know so that you're not surprised if we have to enforce some consequences for behavior. So it was welcoming and also informative. And over the years, since we started this, the language has softened quite a bit in the informative part of the letter. We also needed to talk to a neighboring organization who was seeing some behaviors outside of their building after school as well, and they were upset because it was perceived this was our problem. This was the library's problem. And if you are a young adult services person in your library, you know that this was then my problem because I was the young adult librarian. So we needed to talk to everyone who had some stake in this. So we talked to middle school administration, the after school program, that neighbor. We talked to City Hall. We talked to the police. We got everybody involved, everybody meeting, talking about the different opportunities for young people to be engaged after school. And once we had those things, then we knew that if we were having behavior from a patron in the library, we could reach out to them and to their parents and say, you know, this doesn't seem to be working, but we're aware of these other opportunities that you could take advantage of that really helped us have a better understanding of what else was going on during the after school time in our community. And doing this, everyone knew we were working on this. This is a top priority for us. I was quoted in the newspaper several times, not always exactly correctly. But people were aware that, hey, we're on top of this. So once we had done those things, and as we were doing those things, I was also trying to engage the patrons here in the library by putting on crafts. And there was no program budget for me to work with. So I was really, somebody donated some yarn and that was my life safer the first year. Our friends group gave me some money so I could purchase board games to keep them doing something after school. The UNL extension office is a wonderful resource for us and their nutrition program will come over every so often and do a program with us on healthy snacks. I also did two book clubs, one here at the library and then more importantly, one at the school. I thought it was important for them to see me as a minority figure in their school. When I visit, it sort of puts me on the side of the teachers because I have access to the teachers and I can walk around the building on my own and I think that changed a perception for them. Plus they were excited to see me at school because it was novel and it's just fun to see somebody at school that's out of your routine during the day. And then they could say, hey, I know you. And then when we saw each other again, we had a better rapport. We're starting to build a relationship. And then this is the big one. Staff was really at a loss here and because this seemed like my problem to fix, we felt like, I felt and I think they did too, that we were often on opposite sides of this. You know, Rochelle was the bleeding heart that loves every middle school child that ever walks through the door and they can do no wrong. It was a perception of that and we needed to work through that and try to overcome that and we did that through Continuing Ed and some staff training and also just talking about our procedures. This is such a big point that it gets its own slides here. So for our staff support, I used an article called Inside the Teen Brain and I do cite this at the end of my presentation to be able to look it up as well. What was important about this article for me is it talked about human brain development and it talked about it in a way that doesn't excuse behavior, but it gives us a reason and it gives us a better understanding. You know, a sixth grader stands at the top of our stairs at the beginning of sixth grade and he looks at our banister and as he's thinking that looks slidey, he's sliding. It happens instantly because he's lacking a filter. It's biological folks. It's true. So as he's sliding and thinking, this is slidey, it's all happening at once. In seventh grade, he pauses just for a moment and he might still slide in seventh grade but he's thought about it for a second and he's maybe even made eye contact with me. So he's checking in. But by eighth grade, he's not stopping anymore. He's not still sliding down the banister and of course there are exceptions to this rule but this child actually exists. He's now graduate high school actually but this happened and I've seen this happen over and over again between the sixth grade and the eighth grade here and what's wonderful about this article is that when other staff would come to me and say, oh, they just have raging hormones, I could say, oh no, no, it's their brains. They're still growing. They're still myelinating and I could point to this and somehow that helps us understand and be a little more compassionate when we make it about growing up and about biological changes in their brain. It softens it a little bit for us. I also introduced staff and did a refresher for those who were already aware of the 40 developmental assets. Take a look at those and see how what we do plays an important part in our community. How we're another positive adult in this child's life. How we are building connections that can last a lifetime. How we're offering entertainment and education and information that they wouldn't necessarily get anywhere else and that we have a unique role in that because we're public libraries and because we subscribe and embrace the Bill of Rights for library users. We also brought in someone else I had seen speak at a conference and I liked her presentation and I liked her background in dealing with she worked with kids who were removed from their homes so she was working with some kids who were pretty tough situations. So it was good for me to bring someone else in so I wasn't the lone bleeding heart so that they could see that this wasn't just me saying hey come on get on board. That there were other people who felt this way as well. And then we needed to reframe the situation so staff could relate to some of the behaviors that we could change on our end that would make our lives easier in the long run. So those are both planning the work day and offering our patrons some options and I framed these things for them like this. At 3.30 to 3.40 in the afternoon we see, we found out at one point that we were seeing 60 to 90 middle school and high school aged children every day who were coming in without a caregiver or an older sibling or a parent. And so when you say 60 to 90 people of any age group that's overwhelming and we were still trying to take breaks, we were still trying to call our overdue list we still thought we were going to cross things off our to-do list at 3.40 in the afternoon. That to me was the equivalent of Burger King thinking you know what it's about 10 minutes to noon why don't we take the fryer's apart and really scrub them clean. It just didn't make any sense. This is our rush. This is our busy, busy time of day. We need all hands on deck. Everybody dealing with customers. Everybody helping people who are the reason we're here. So if your break isn't taken by 3.30 you're not going to get your break today and if you haven't done that today don't worry about it until tomorrow. So you're off the hook. And then we needed to change the way we were having conversations with patrons and we were hearing a lot I hate going to the library after school. This time of day is the worst time of day to visit. And we were commiserating with them. We were yeah we know it's busy it's really chaotic there's a lot of people here it's noisy. We needed to change that script. We needed to change our response so that it was positive rather than wallowing. And we all did it, myself included. So I thought of it this way. You will very rarely find me at a grocery store on a Saturday morning because there's, I can think of a million other places I would rather be. Some of them even unpleasant. I can't stand going to the grocery store when it is that busy when people are taking up the whole lane when someone stopped in the middle of the aisle to dig in her 50 pound purse for that 110 cent coupon for something I just can't stand it. And if I were to go to the manager and say I hate coming here on Saturday mornings you should do something about this. There's not, there's not anything he's going to do about this these are his customers these are his patrons that's why they're there. So what he would be smart to do instead is to offer me alternatives. Did you know you can order your groceries online? We'll have them ready for you when you get here if that's a service they offer. We deliver groceries so if there's something you need call us, let us know. Or he could say, you know, Tuesday evenings are the quietest here. If you want to get in and out of here without hassle and you can rearrange stuff so you can come on Tuesday nights that's ideal. That's him finding ways to solve the problem I'm presenting him with. We needed to do the same for our patrons. So instead of just saying, oh I know I'm so busy in here right now we could say, you know, if you call me a day ahead of, if you call us a day ahead of time we'll get your books ready you can pop in and pop right back out we'll have them at the desk for you. Or we could say you know, the best kept secret in town is that we're open to 10 o'clock on Saturday mornings so don't go to your grocery shopping then go to the library then because that's one we're not busy. So those are the things we needed to change as we needed to change our culture and our attitudes in order to make that more positive for everyone involved. And that's just good customer service. And then if you are approaching this problem and you are setting out to solve it, you definitely need to keep some things in mind. You know, we had we talked about already it was my problem to solve because I was the young adult librarian. So here are the things you really want to avoid. More rules that are specific to an age group. We had a policy and procedure be proposed to us that outlined some very specific behaviors outlined very specific consequences and the language that was used gave it away that this was really aimed at one age group. And that to me wasn't comfortable because had I seen what I thought of as horseplay between two adults I was not going to want to approach it the same way that policy was suggesting I approach it for a couple of 12 year olds because that situation is potentially more dangerous for me and we needed to level that out we needed that to be something we could enforce across the board from youngest to oldest and we say that we abide by the library Bill of Rights so that's in there that is in line with that. And then we needed to be careful that it wasn't me versus them or me and my supervisor or me and whoever else had come around and decided that okay we can solve this but it didn't look like us versus them and that was tough and then we needed to make sure that if a young adult patron returns a book and it's wet or it's damaged or they lose a book that doesn't come back to me to solve. That's a circulation function. That's not something I do. I buy the books I put on the programs and I help advocate for them when we develop policy. Those are my major functions as a young adult librarian and it didn't need to be me calling them and saying hey you turn that book back in and it was wet. That's not my function and this is why because these are my kids and no one's allowed to tell my daughter I use this picture because it's several years old but this is Tyson, Sierra and Declan and they're fantastic kids and I'm very proud of them. When staff would come to me and say hey one of your kids made a mess with paper towels in the bathroom I wanted to say well who dropped them off because they were supposed to go home with their dad but that was how it was being brought to me. One of your kids just went screaming out the door. One of your kids slid down the banister and what I needed to do was change that perception because guess who isn't my kid every child on earth between the ages of 11 and 19 I needed to divorce myself from the idea that they all belong to me which wasn't really hard to do actually but I needed to help other people get away from that thinking they are all our patrons and there were times during this process when things were really difficult because this took a long time that I cried at my desk I just how am I ever going to stay here and fix this it's impossible it's too big but what got me through and what I hope if you get nothing else out of this today and even if you get this next point that maybe you can share it with someone else who will get it next chant this to yourself a patron is a patron is a patron is a patron is a patron I could not say that enough I had to do this for everyone involved for staff, for myself for the people I advocate for and for all of our library visitors and in doing this it's simple stop saying my teens stop saying my patrons don't use that pronoun stop owning them all on your own they are our patrons they are our teens they are our visitors they are our customers start using that language so then when I was turning this down and not using the term my teens, now if you and I meet and we're both young adult librarians and we're talking about the things that we do in our libraries I'm going to say my teens love this that's okay but if you're dealing with this and you're seeing that division mix that language you can't use it anymore it is on your no list also as part of our continuing ed I put together some things that were working for a couple of us my supervisor was really a big cheerleader for me at the time and we were both trying different things to see what would work when we were trying to address behavior issues in the library and the things that worked are the things that we took to staff and said hey this is what we'd like to see everyone doing so we asked them when patrons start coming in smile, greet them kind of get in where they are if they're all around this table and it's near the magazine rack that's the time to dust the magazine rack and to make sure everything's in order so just be where they are and sort of don't let that sort of energy build around them get in there right away and help diffuse it ask them if they need help they're customers so say we have a program today a new cart of books just came up today guys or say did you know that we have board games you guys could all be playing Monopoly at risk right now and then I also noticed that they tended to be just a little bit quieter even if it was only a notch just a little quieter if they were seated so we would ask them to sit so after they've been here for about 10 minutes or so if they're still standing and still kind of pacing around we do ask them to find a chair or we did this is before we had a teen space now we do things a little differently but this will work in most libraries I think and then if there were eight patrons around a table that was designed for four we'd say hey could four of you move over there you guys choose who moves but when I come back I need to see fewer people at this table and then if behaviors were just not settling down if we were seeing some specific things or we had asked them to hey you know we need to split up we needed to get very clear and I call this one and done one verbal warning and then you follow through if you don't see improvement so we want them to ask the patron if they need help if the patron says no you can say alright that's great we see that it's too noisy over here and it can't continue to be this noisy if it stays this loud I'm going to ask you to leave for the day I give one warning so I won't be back over here to warn you and remind you again do you understand you'll be leaving and then they say yes and I walk away and then if they continue to be loud I don't give them an evil eye I don't point at them I don't holler at them from across the room I get up I go over and I say you had your warning it's not quieter I'm asking you to leave for the day and then I walk into the door but I don't say hey what did I say hey I warned you so let's go back a second so what we were seeing Krista can you still hear me because I'm getting a pop up that says I have problems here yes I can hear you just fine okay perfect are you doing okay yeah are you hearing me okay yeah sometimes it says it recognizes that maybe some sort of a lull something with the broadband or something or with your machine and gives you a little warning but no you haven't you've done you've come through very clearly yeah okay perfect well I'll continue and then we'll have questions in just a moment sure I just want to mention one thing that this is one of those cases where sometimes I wish we did have webcams set up for when I'm presenting these remote speakers because it was really I'm sitting here nodding all of that stuff you're saying about treating the kids like they are they are your patrons as well just as valid a patron as anyone else and I'm nodding and I just kind of wish through his cameras here so we can see everyone yes alright well thank you let's go ahead and keep going so this was really important for us too because what we were noticing is that so there were four people who worked a desk near our computer lab and two of us said okay we're going to go ahead and we're going to try this one warning and you're gone we're going to do the one and done and we're going to see how it goes we saw considerable improvement on our days and we were not seeing any improvement on the days that other people were at the desk and we sort of put them in a bad spot by not cluing them in but we wanted some solid evidence that it was working and what was the difference between the two of us and let me tell you what was happening before we did the one and done and give you a story about it so that I can sell you on this because it feels mean at first and I'm going to tell you it's not I have proof so the other two staff members what we saw and more than just these two were doing it but just in this one of the library we would see behaviors in the computer lab and then the person at the desk would say hey guys and usually they're still seated and they're pointing guys and you'd see it quieter over there needs to get quieter over there or else and then they go back to their work and things would get noisy again and you'd hear them say hey what did I say I told you guys if you didn't get quiet you were going to go and then a little while later this is the third time I'm telling you and then the next time I have told you so many times you need to be quiet so by this time the staff member the staff member and the visiting patron who has the behavior has disrupted everyone's library use that day it's made it unpleasant for everyone in that area the staff member is frustrated the staff member is then angry and the patron who has the behavior knows it so what I noticed is that one day I went over we had a patron at the time who had no volume control and you know these folks they just are always kind of at 11 it's always they're outside voice even when they're whispering I don't know how it works but they do this so I walked over and he had two people standing next to him watching him play runescape this is how long ago this was and they were being noisy and I walked over and I said hey guys it's way too loud over here it needs to get quieter I'm going to ask you to leave for the day I give one warning that's it so if it doesn't stop you're going to go do you understand we understand as I walked away it was a nice one she gives a warning I was almost floored by that because that's all the other staff that's all those other two were doing was just the warning over and over again so that told me a couple of things one that they just didn't listen once you didn't follow through you were noise you weren't authority you were just noise and also you were a liar don't lie to your patrons especially why would you lie to that 12 year old there's just no need so if there isn't an or else let the behavior continue just let it keep happening if you're not going to follow through on it it's so important it built trust for them I was the nice one for only giving them one warning so it does work it feels mean at first you have to kick some people out you're going to have to do it in order for them to know that this is we mean business but then they come back and you start over and I say that when I walk them to the door I say you come back tomorrow it's a new day we're going to try again and so we needed to go back to that culture changing our script we had a few more things to hammer out because these were the most common things that we would hear aside from the things we already talked about so we had a limited number of computers and someone would come in and say these kids they're just playing games they're just on Facebook they're not doing anything serious they should be reading a book they should be doing something productive with their lives I need a computer well we could commiserate they should be doing something more productive with their young minds or we could say have a reservation system we could make a reservation for you if it's 20 minutes you could run an errand come back and get on the computer it'd be all yours or we could say you know it is really business time of day but if you come back at about 6.37 so quiet you'll be able to get a lot done we could also say hey come in on Saturday mornings nobody knows we're open at 10 o'clock yet those are all options we could give them and it preserved the dignity of all of the library users we weren't judging one user's use over another that was really important and because we would do that for that patron who was complaining if someone thought what he was doing wasn't as important or crucial as whatever they needed to do we talked already about I don't use the library after school anymore I also wanted staff to get an idea if that's a safety issue or if it's just an annoyance factor and in some cases it was a safety issue and we realized that some patrons who maybe had mobility issues or who were entering the library on their own felt intimidated by walking through a large group of teenagers to get into the building so that helped us like oh we really need to crack down on what's happening outside we need to pay a lot of attention to our front door and it was considerably better and then the big one one day I had a man come in on a Friday and I was working by the computer lab and he needed directions or something and Fridays tend to be a really boisterous energetic time because we're closed at five so everybody's in and they're hurrying and the energy is really empty and crackling and so he came in and then he looked around and he said wow this is like a daycare and I said you know you are in the most happening place to be in Columbus right now welcome to our party and then he laughed it changed the entire interaction for him we were both smiling and laughing about it we were kind of having to yell over the noise but we had a positive interaction he left feeling good I didn't have to diminish everything and I was feeling good because I felt like I had handled it successfully and in a positive way so just wherever you can turn that you know turn that ship around a little bit and see if you can get that attitude to change you might convince yourself to in the process so then you know staff was not every staff member was an easy sell on my ideas how to deal with our large number of patrons after school so I had a lot of what I call it at my own home yeah buts yeah okay that's great but so I heard this yeah but what do we do when patrons are loud in the computer lab or at the tables those are the steps we talked about ask if they need help offer them a service and then let them know hey it's too loud over here if that doesn't stop I'm going to be back and I'm going to ask you to leave for the day so if you don't want to leave for the day you might decide if you want to sit over here with all eight of you you might want to split up do that in the computer lab if they were sitting around the tables throughout the library when they're loud outside it still applies and if they're loud on the sidewalk and they say you can't tell me what to do here I'm on the sidewalk that's a phone call to the police just being a nuisance and then if patrons are being physical in the building I'm pretty strict about horse play and one seat per seat that sort of thing that physical interaction we try to keep to a minimum here a little bit of shoulder bumping and that sort of thing when they first see each other that jostling kind of turned the other way but if it's horse play, if it's legitimate that can turn in a second and become serious and somebody's upset because that really hurt so we just we just say no hands to yourself and I joke with them that it either falls under being violent or public display of affection so just keep your hands to yourself here at the library when they're bouncing or running and playing hide and seek at this time we didn't really have a nice big teen space so it was pretty much that's a safety issue worn but if they're being serious threat to someone's safety because the building where they're doing it is really full of people just telling them they got to go for the day they know better and then if they're destroying or defacing property I've told staff just call the police that's a crime if you catch them and they're tagging or they're tearing up books or doing anything like that you can just call the police that's criminal behavior and we should do that if we walked up to an adult who was carving something in the table or if we saw an adult tagging something or tearing a book apart how safe we feel approaching that adult and saying you need to stop doing that and I'm asking you to leave for the day we might not feel safe but it's a situation where we probably call the non-emergency number and say hey we got somebody over here who we need addressed so keep that in mind how would I handle this if this was a 40 year old person or 30 year old person or 20 year old person and behave accordingly okay so we're about to get to the really fun stuff all the pictures of my program so does anybody have any questions about anything we've talked about so far or anything I haven't covered yeah so far nobody has typed anything if anybody does any questions use your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface just click in there and you can type in your question I'm monitoring it here so do that at any time we'll grab them I did have one question about the staff that you you talked about dealing with your staff I came down myself a note to say you said that you helped bring them along but how difficult was that and you actually just kind of got into that but I wonder if I get very curious about people who either come into the library or your staff and seem to think that these teens are potentially a nuisance or I can't believe they're acting this way or what do I do about them do you think it has to do with some of these people do not have experience with kids they never had their own they don't know I mean if you've raised your own children you should kind of know what they're going to do and how to deal with them is that potentially something I can't imagine someone who has been a parent not knowing what you know we have to take into account to sometimes it's not having had experience with teens sometimes it's just having a wholly different experience where you were able to pick your kids up after school and you took them home or your kids were within walking distance and could let them in or you know sometimes it's just a really different home situation there's a socio-economic issue there as well especially here and you know sometimes there were we have a large Hispanic population here and sometimes those comments were racially charged I mean not so much from staff but so we really had to a lot of that was delicate and we really had to there's going to be various reasons why each person different people are going to have different reasons you've got to kind of feel it out and decide what is the appropriate way of addressing this particular person's concerns it depends too if your staff has you know if this is their retirement job and they come from a different background you know we had some people come in from different careers where they had more authority over the young people that they served we don't have that authority we are not the school you know so their philosophy was just different and you know we're a public library so we have to approach that a little differently and one of the things when we talked about people asking don't you feel like this is a daycare one of the other things I use for that when people would ask me is to just smile at them and say I can't imagine where else they'd be I don't know where else they'd go and when I can give them that picture where would you displace 60 to 90 middle school and high school students after school where else are they going to go is there something else is there a teen center that's separate from the library or an area that they have for this in your town and some towns do which you might say they may have come from places that do have that and some don't and sometimes I'd let them know I've heard some of the stories these kids tell they can go home but they don't want to when I can paint a different picture of a reality for them without saying anything overly specific or giving anything away that helps soften sometimes I think that address actually somebody did type in a question that I think that may address talking about the question is they get adult customers complaining about the teens being disruptive and it should be a quiet place to study in the library and how do you address this issue with the complainer to get them to understand that teens are allowed here as well and that's my kind of thing that you just did say but they also added especially what if they indicate the adult that they can't come at a different time when you suggest well here's a different time you can come you can do this I mean have you had to deal with that kind of situation where they say well you know Saturday mornings I can't come in at 10 a.m. Yeah well we offer study rooms that they can book so we say you know we have study rooms they're free you could use study rooms for that unfortunately at the time we didn't have a computer that they could take with them if they that's what they were here for but if they wanted a quiet reading space we offer meeting rooms so and yeah we got to think about options and what you can do to give them a place to go yeah definitely and then another question came in what about kids who are being disruptive but are actually waiting for their parents to come and pick them up well we offer a couple of options there we do have a phone where they can call mom or dad if they need to but if we have decided you cannot be here anymore today and you are waiting for a ride there are two places call mom and dad and let them know you'll be waiting across the street at the police station or call mom and dad and let them know that you'll be at the town square that's just a walk away okay so you just have to give them somewhere else safe to go to have an option yeah you can't just say okay fine you're allowed to stay here because I think it goes back to what you're saying about how you have to follow up there have to be the actual consequences they don't think that you're a liar that nothing's ever going to happen right and you know we've had parents call and say you kicked my kid out and he's you know I had this happen you removed my child from a program and said they had to sit outside and he's on medication he can't be in the heat well he's got to behave when he's here that's part of the condition of being in this place and I have no way of knowing that and I would never put them in danger knowingly but we just have to walk through that with the parent afterward and let them know that we are serious this is a place they have to behave and they have to explain the situation exactly what happened so they know well we didn't just do this with no reason behind it there was having that whole policy of how you deal with it and that it's all there that you can also not just tell the kids this is what's going to happen you get one warning that their parents also understand here is how we deal with it if you'd like it here's our policy in writing you can take that and study it with your child and let them know okay well and we also have that unattended child policy to fall back on we have decided this year 11 you can be here by yourself but you have to be able to maintain library appropriate behavior during that time so we can go back to that and say you know you've let your kid come here by himself you're expecting him to behave a certain way we expect everyone to behave a certain way and we would ask anyone who is doing that to leave so when we can say that we treat you know that we address that behavior similarly across the board it helps I like that I think part of your way of explaining it to the other staff was what would you do if this was an adult acting the same way you've got you know treat them all the same and yeah then it all yeah alright that's all we have for questions right now I'll let you go ahead and continue on with the rest of your presentation okay so I said that I started in April 2009 in May well April 2010 this was my office picture you're seeing here right in front where that glasses is where my desk was and I moved in next door with a very tolerant co-worker my friends group or our friends group gave me money so I could purchase some decorations and some bean bags for this space and we created this little teen space this little nook now I've already said that we had 60 to 90 patrons visiting every day after school in this age group when we created this space we had not stood at the door and counted okay so just so you know I want to clarify that because we created this space because it was the path of least resistance I wanted a space to say hey guys you need your own space you deserve a place to sit and when I when I did that I just wanted a nod at it we're trying and we found out quickly that this was not enough space when school started then in August of 2010 and that's when things really ramped up and got serious we need to address this after school issue we had some people who were really concerned about it and get really vocal so that's when we stood at the door and counted over 60 every day and there was a couple of days it was over 90 which is just I never would have guessed it was that high I just knew there were a lot so so that was our first one we realized it wasn't working we needed to find something different we tried the more paths of least resistance unused space beating space that we thought we might be able to convert but these things have problems like no wifi no cell phone access that they were blind that I would be the only staff person in the area that it would give us one more area that always needed staffed and someone suggested what about the nonfiction room on the second floor it doesn't circulate that much it needs to be we need to bring those materials down with the rest of the nonfiction because it was split between two floors and at the time I thought oh everyone here hates me already and they're going to give me one half of the second floor like why don't we just paint a bull's eye on my head so I was really nervous to say yes to this and I never thought in a million years that anybody would really give it to me so I called our system administrator Jessica Chamberlain and I called Sally Snyder at the commission and I said with the two of you visit walk through the building talk us through this let us tell you the pros and cons we see you tell us what you see they were really helpful in giving their feedback and I remember very clearly Jessica saying this is where it needs to be and that was like permission for me to embrace the idea that they would give me one quarter of the building blew me away so people got busy the reference librarian who at the time was also my supervisor we did heavily moved the nonfiction collection got an art print collection that we have moved and distributed around the building we had a an art club that had what was basically a meeting room dedicated to displays for their club we relocated them to a spot that makes way more sense and gives them a lot more visibility and created another room that I now use for programming and then I talked to the young adults who were visiting the library and said hey guys what do you want in your teen space and then if you do go through this process you want to take before pictures because I didn't there are no existing pictures of what this space looked like before and then we talked to our foundation who was willing to give me some money to buy some furniture and some paint for the space the teens picked in the bottom left hand corner you see the rug they picked that they liked that the best anything else for the space was sort of inspired by that rug so and actually this was open in August of 2011 but this was our ribbon cutting day so this is when I took pictures you see we have a nice lounge area this is visible from the landing of the second floor it's a huge space you can see in this picture just how big it is and why I thought there's no way anybody would give this to me so that's what it looked like when we started and you can see the lounges in the front there and then we have fiction and nonfiction and then our graphic novel collection in the third section some more of the furniture and then in April 2013 we rearranged this space you could see the lounge from the landing of the second floor and that was fantastic it drew people in and was really bright and colorful but what I had noticed is that the patrons who kind of hung out in that lounge area would heckle the kids who were walking by to go get books and I didn't want readers to have to run that gauntlet in order to get what they wanted at the library so we flip-flopped those two sections so that the books that were most circulating were closest to the door we had already done our work of advertising our space so we could do that so there was some outcry what about the splatter painted walls we can't leave those so in this picture this is right before we painted I said we can splatter paint some more walls and so we did and they had a blast this is what it looked like last summer it was starting to look really finished with new book displays slat wall and displays for our shelves and you can see the lounge area there is now in the middle and in the summertime if you've ever heard me talk about any time activities I think that was my last and compass live session I did with passive programs we put our any time activities in that lounge area throughout the summer and then this is what it looked like yesterday so this last school year I went to an art teacher and she had an outreach class that they were supposed to create some community art projects I went and talked to them about the teen space and about the library service and told them a little bit of our history how we got here they painted these amazing canvases for me and for everyone to enjoy in the teen space and that just made everything feel cohesive and done and the best part is until two years from now when we take these down to have a new art class paint the other side of the canvases for us I don't have to get on a ladder and decorate up there anymore that's pretty exciting because that's terrible this is a shot from the other side we notice that after school with so many visitors these tables here will just get piled up with binders and jackets and book bags so I covered them before the first day of school wrote some questions on there I leave crayons out after school they can draw and color on there and then the little pop up tents there say no binders or backpacks please and these crates on the side are where we ask them if you're going to walk away from your stuff leave it here so that it's not in everyone's way so that's something new we're trying and we're going to add some coat hooks above that you can see in this picture too that we have eight computers for them to use we went ahead and just put the roblox software on them so it's already installed for them and then back toward the middle of the room I don't know if you can really see it in the picture we have a table where we tether iPads right now I have three iPads in my department so that gives them some opportunity to use technology here in the building and play games and then also this summer as of June we ordered a custom desk for this space we had been using a tall counter up until then just some repurposed furniture so many of our patrons to get their books up and over I just couldn't even see over it it was way too tall I liked the idea of a standing desk for health purposes but it was just really impractical for this space and they loved the desk in the summer time I can leave my sign in sheet for summer reading programs right there on that counter they sign in and then they come and enjoy the program in the rest of the teen space so that is where we are today with that also we have somewhere in these years we decided that we needed someone we do have a question that is related to your space there that you have set up now I just want to clarify because I wasn't exactly sure you said that this space that you were given upstairs was the non-fiction section you said so is this space actually a whole separate room or is there part of this that we are not seeing is the rest of the regular library let me scooch back up because the question here is about they have a space where the young adult books are actually shelved in an area where there are computers and tables but adults are in the library using them also during the day that just happens to be the place where the YA books are made so that it is the teen only so the idea maybe to make a teen only zone after school I'm going to flip back to this if you can see right there above the computers I borrowed some language from the Kearney public library's teen space the yellow sign says that when school is not in session these computers are for young adults between the ages it says 11 to 17 or 6 to 12 grade so during the day when they're in school I'll have adults that come up and use this space they meet up here I know there's some adult tutoring that happens in the space that's completely fine after school when there are teens in the space if staff sees adults hanging out we're all to go up and say hey can we get you a study room would you like to move downstairs to the reference section we offer them options but then we say this is really reserved for the teens after school you're welcome to browse and get what you need but if you need to park for a little while we'd like to give you a meeting room and you might want to because it's going to get a little rowdy in here if you stick around yeah make it a positive kind of interaction yeah because sometimes they're going to talk about stuff you don't want to hear and it's just probably better if we avoid that so we have we do that and then we have someone who's hired first this was a middle school teacher we hired to come walk around after school the advantages of the middle school teacher being your afternoon monitor it's that they know everyone's name that's really positive and the kids already know them as well and see them as an authority figure and then I don't have to be the bad guy who says I'm kicking you out but will you come do some reading with me next year so and now that's evolved into it's a para from the school she walks around every day she gets here just a few minutes before they do she straightens up the teen space she addresses adults that are in the space and say you know it's going to get really noisy in here can we offer you a different space so we kind of clear them out first and she's so sweet she's the nicest bouncer I think in the world this is the bouncer for the library so she takes care of that sort of preemptively before they get here and then in the summertime when the kids aren't in school anymore then I get out there in the morning and I say hey guys the kids are out of school now and then they leave and I feel like exactly what this person suggested is what you guys are doing there is you have certain times when it is designated teen only and you make sure the adults know it so that they realize what's going to start what's going to be happening there and this is a good example for places I know some places are able to have a separate room with a door that is specifically just for the teens and that's all it's for and everyone makes it very easy but if you don't have that case yeah available to you this is exactly yeah this is on the second floor and we do allow the teens to use the computers in the main we call it a main computer lab we have a main computer lab and then the computers in the teen space they're allowed anywhere in the building this live person says their teen space is actually in their basement and not all of the teens make it down there like they come in and they just find they don't know or they don't make it they haven't had any major background they're just wondering about them missing out on the teen programs and materials and like are the kids is it just a matter of I guess educating them making sure they know that's where you let them know that that's the place you let them know that hey on Wednesdays we have snacks down here and if they choose not to participate it's okay we do what the space you're looking at right now is where we do a lot of our craft programs in the summer and while we're doing craft programs there are kids playing Minecraft and Roblox on those computers they're not participating in the program but the other kids are participating and that's okay we let both of those things happen at the same time we sometimes have to address noise there but no there are some some of our after-school visitors have been instructed by mom wait downstairs so you can see me the parking situation is terrible parking so parents don't want to have to try to find a spot so they really want their children to be watching and then sometimes we say you can use the teen space computers guys why don't you go up there my mom doesn't want me to because she doesn't want to go upstairs when she gets here so we say okay be down here that's fine so it's just like we let children go in all areas of the library but we wouldn't necessarily let two or one or two adults who arrived without children to sort of linger in those spaces we would probably address that in the children's do you need some help help you find what you need and then there are great places for you to sit downstairs dive them to the right of the appropriate section absolutely think of it that way kind of equate it that way but if they don't want to participate they've been in a desk all day participating at school all day and now they just want to unwind and be who they are that's okay doesn't mean you're not cool you're still really really cool cool I even answered both those questions go ahead so then something we do that we talk about a patron as a patron as a patron but we also want to meet people where they are and we want to equip our young adult visitors when they get here at the beginning of the school year and a lot of them are six graders this year we're seeing a lot of new faces so our after school our afternoon monitor stands at the front door with these little cutouts I put six of them on one sheet of paper so they're not very big and these are the rules of the teen space what they can do what they shouldn't do and what we absolutely will not tolerate and I tell staff if you need if you feel like this is terrible behavior and you want to give a warning if it falls under this last half definitely I'm okay with that so I don't think anybody's going to argue with you if you see somebody get punched you don't have to say don't punch again or ask you to leave you can just ask them to leave so we hand this to them and then as we interact with them for the next couple of weeks after the start of school we'll say so did you get one of those at the beginning when you got here the first day after school can you tell me one thing you read on there we'll just kind of quiz them a little bit when they're in the teen space so we know that they know that we're aware they've been given rules and then the other thing you can do with these I leave these at desks because sometimes we have staff who are a little timid to approach behaviors especially when the behavior isn't necessarily violent but maybe there are a couple of teens who are getting a little cozy I like to take this and slide this little hand out in front of them and then I just whisper to them reach from the bottom up please and then I walk away I come back a couple of minutes later and usually they're grinning and blushing a little bit and their seats are a little farther apart so I don't have to address it in a way that really overly embarrasses them in front of everyone it's just kind of quiet you need to move away a little bit so it's handy to have these rules we used to have them posted in the teen space it's just another sign we really need to be up on our feet enforcing these things and we just added the bullying of any kind to the bottom of this list last year because sometimes we had some issues with Facebook we could see that it was happening we could address it then and say that's bullying and we don't allow that we're not going to let you do that on our computer and tailor our interaction that way so yes, a patron is a patron is a patron is a patron but also we meet them where they are so we hand the rules to the middle school students who come in at the beginning of the school year just like we do homebound service for people who have that special need you know we kind of refer our service to who they are and that's okay as long as it's not discriminatory and this is done in a respectful way so and then these resources are available to you inside the teen brain I can't say enough good things about that article it's really something I lean on heavily and if you're in the thick of it with this it's going to be a big okay, okay, I know what I'm dealing with now and then our policies please use and copy those as you need and then my contact information is there as well and that's what I've got okay, great, thank you Michelle if you have them we are about 10 minutes over our official time but that's okay as I've told people before no that's okay, we go as long as it takes here to get through everything if anybody has any last minute questions you want to ask right now, get it in there otherwise there's her contact info you can always I'm sure reach out to her later and ask her for more clarification or help with doing things at your library we do have a comment Sally Snyder who you mentioned earlier is actually watching in another room and says wonderful presentation, Michelle, thank you hi Sally and also some more thank yous coming through as well so I just let everyone know these links will be available as I said afterwards when we do our recordings I'll put up those as well so you have quick links to them if you don't try and scribble down like that long URL or anything we'll get you quick links to that and I think I didn't ask you, Michelle can you either send me this PowerPoint or send me a link where you post it somewhere I will link to that as well for people yes, I will email it to you when we get down here okay, great, yep, so when the recording is up you guys will have access to these slides too if you want to go back and refer to them again doesn't look like anybody has any urgent questions coming through, just lots of very thank yous thank yous, excellent presentation very helpful great, thank you I am available for hand-holding and commiserating because this was tough it sounds like it, yeah and I think it's at the very beginning you talk about how there was nothing before for this trying to basically, you didn't have anything to build on, it had been done previously you were really really starting from scratch to figure out what to do with these teens yeah, people are probably tired of hearing me say it but I didn't inherit so much as a speck of glitter in a craft box there was nothing going on other than a solid collection we did have a great young adult collection I think a lot more libraries are doing these teen zones and things specific for them and obviously it's working if you do it right and the consistency of how you're treating them and treating them respectfully makes all the difference in the world to people of that age, yeah it can be tough but it's really rewarding I love my job and I get to have a lot of fun and now we have a great space to do it in and staff overall is more positive that's great, yeah making sure the other staff are involved in it as well when they were talking about they're your kids they know they're all our patrons that made a big difference have some empowerment and ownership over them as well yes don't make me always be the mean one spread it out a little, yeah all right, great, I think we will then wrap it up I'm going to pull back control here to my screen thank you very much Richelle that was great exactly what we were looking for here today I think great presentation I said it was from our conference last year and I did miss it that time so I'm glad I got to hear it this time though yes, our power on our laptop died because it was the end of the day it was the last session no one got to see all my great pictures so you're seeing it at the right time I'm glad we got him here then for you all right that will wrap it up for today's show thank you Richelle thank you everyone for attending the show has been recorded we will be available on our website here this is our main page all of our archives go right here on our archive sessions page and we will have the recording available this is last week's the presentation available and the links you mentioned there at the end will all be available for you to watch later or if you have a colleague who wasn't able to join us this morning share it with them so as I said that wraps up for today I hope you join us next week when our topic is could a jigsaw puzzle tournament be your next fundraiser North Platte, Nebraska their public library has been doing these jigsaw puzzle tournaments for 10 years and they have huge competitions and it's a fundraising type thing a real fun event so I'm going to have their director Cecilia will be with us next week to talk about that program that they do so please do sign up for that and any of our other future sessions that we have here also Encompass Live is on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user please do pop over there and like our page it's coming up slowly here we go I post when new shows are coming up like here this morning I gave people a reminder they could log in on the fly to today's show when recordings are available I announce on here so if you are a big Facebook user definitely go over that over there and you'll be notified of things we're doing for the show other than that thank you very much for attending and we will see you next time on Encompass Live bye bye