 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover any sort of activities that might be of interest to Nebraska librarians across the state. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time for an hour. They're free and they are recorded so if you can't attend any of our live sessions you can watch a lot of our recordings online. We do a mixture of presentations, interviews, book reviews, tours, web tours of different products, anything we can think of or come up with that might be of interest to people. We do sessions with commission staff and we have guest speakers like we have today. Well, kind of a mixture. Combination. Yeah. Today we have a very cool, interesting program that we're going to be talking about or you'll be presenting about. Erica Hamilton, the coordinator of Primetime, a program from the Nebraska Humanities Council, is going to be talking about that and I'll just let you go ahead and take over and do your thing and tell us all about it. Okay, stick this over and I'll bet you the mouse and you are good to go. Well, as Krista said, I'm Erica Hamilton. I'm a senior program officer with the Nebraska Humanities Council and I've been working with Primetime Family Reading Time since 2005 and actually began in 2004. What Primetime is, there we go, Primetime is a six-week humanities-based storytelling reading and discussion program that is primarily held in public libraries but it's also been held in elementary schools and in other public venues and it's offered to schools and other public venues when a public library either doesn't have a space or doesn't have a schedule to fit it in. We do like libraries to be involved, though, if it is in the school or in the public venue. Primetime, this is what a typical Primetime session looks like. We start with a meal and that's because with Primetime we like to break down any barriers that might prevent a family from attending. A lot of the time, Primetime is in the evening, it starts at six and goes until about 7.30 and for those families who just get off work and think, well, how are we going to get food prepared and eat and get to the library at six o'clock, this helps them because they don't have to worry about it. They can just come to the library, spend a half an hour eating. It gives them a time to talk with the other families, bond with the other families and that makes Primetime an even better program. That's very cool. Yeah, I like that bit. It also lets the librarians get to know the families, too, before the program starts, so it helps the bonding between the librarians and the families. Then we have comments from special guests. We like to invite special guests later on during the program because Primetime does receive a lot of funding. It receives funding from the state legislature. It receives funding from businesses and nonprofit organizations, individuals, and we like to invite them to come see Primetime because once they see it, they understand it better and we really appreciate their funding and so we also give them a chance to talk with the families about their business or their organization. As you can see down here, that is Senator Scott Price and he had a great time when he visited and he had such a good time, he participated in discussion and that's very important when the state legislature is talking about funding for the Humanities Council. Oh yeah. After the comments from the special guests, we have the interactive reading and storytelling. We also have discussion over real life issues presented in each book and I'll talk about that more a little bit later in the presentation and then we have the all-important library commercial because one of the things we want to do with Primetime is to introduce these families to the resources available at the library and so the library commercial is just what it sounds like. It's a five-minute presentation on what is available, either bringing in books and showing them the books and saying this is available in the library or taking them on a tour of the library showing them the computer lab, different things like that each week to let them know what's available. That's so great. What a good way to do this, yeah. And then we have door prizes which aren't a requirement but they're fun and they keep families coming back and then the piece of... What kind of door prizes? Books a lot. A lot of the time it's books. It's books that the libraries are... They're out of circulation and the libraries have a bunch of books or the libraries have gone out to certain things, gone free stuff. Some libraries spend a lot of money on door prizes, some don't. It's not... As I said, it's not a requirement. It's up to the site what they do with door prizes and Lincoln they don't even do door prizes during the weeks. They just gather a few stuff up for the very last week and hand them out. That's up to the site. And then at the very end they check out books. The families get to take home books at the end of each session and they are to read the books before the next session and then during the next session the storyteller and discussion leader will read and discuss those books. And then at the end of the week they bring them back to primetime. Now primetime was developed by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in 1991 and they have done... You can't see it there, but they've done over 400, 500 programs. Nebraska became involved in primetime in 2004 and since then we've been doing... We've completed 62 primetime programs in 15 public libraries, five elementary schools, two community centers, and 13 communities. And this spring we're adding our 14th community. We're going to be an alliance since in the spring. And that map on the lower corner is everywhere we've been with primetime. And the upper map is the national expansion of primetime. It's been quite a few places in the United States and of all those places Nebraska ranks fourth in how many programs we've completed. That's great. That is fabulous. We're just behind Louisiana, California, and Kentucky. We consider our population. I think we're doing pretty good. Yes, we are doing pretty good. And we're very fortunate that Nebraska is looked at as one of the leaders in primetime. Our target audience, I've talked about this a little bit, but we're really going for families who are low income and who do not have a habit of reading at home with their children. They struggle with reading. They might be beginning in their literacy. They might have... The parents might not have completed their high school education. They might not know English very well. We're looking at communities where student reading scores do not meet state standards because what we're trying to do is to show these families what a joy it is to read together and to discuss books together. And when you get families who that's their habit and they already know the program doesn't have as much impact as when you get the families who think of reading as a chore and think of it as a school activity that they really don't afford to. And primetime helps to change that. We're also looking for families who haven't been in the library very much, who don't know about the library, who don't know what the libraries have to offer. And so because of that, there's a lot of outreach that the libraries do to the communities to reach out to those families who haven't been in the library. I was going to ask, how do you get them to come? Well, I'll talk about that a little bit. When the Humanities Council was looking at a literacy program back in 2003 and 2004 and we found primetime, we wanted to use it to reach out to the community that needed it the most. And so we did a lot of research into graduation rates and just the population in Nebraska. And what we've discovered then and what we're still discovering now is that Nebraska is one of 13 new growth states. And what that means is that we have a really large immigrant population. Anywhere you go in Nebraska, you'll probably see that, that there's a lot of Spanish-speaking workers. We are getting refugees from Africa. We're getting refugees from Asia. And because of that then, in our schools, ELL, English Language Learning, has grown by 227% as tripled in 10 years between 1995 and 2005. And that's a big population. We've also discovered through studies that 64% of immigrant children have parents who struggle with English and 40% of parents, 40% of those children have parents who never finished high school. And when you're thinking about how well children do in school, they really need a support system from their family. And children who are from families who don't speak English very well, who don't read books, they really struggle in school. And there's been studies that have shown that the children who do better in school are the ones who can read and write, combine together, and speak English well. The children who can read, write, and speak English well do the best. And also those who have parents who support them in their efforts to finish high school. And primetime helps with that in several ways. Looking at the graduation rates, these are graduation rates, and this says a 2007 report, but it's actually from, I think, 2004, the stats from 2004. And these are from Nebraska. Hispanics and Latinos, their graduation rate is 53.8%. That's actually risen since 2004 when we were at first looking at graduation rates. So they've been doing better in Nebraska. And I'd like to say that's because of primetime. Not sure we can see that. It may not be a direct relationship, but I'm sure it's part of it. It's nice to see. And it's something you hear a lot more about that people are realizing there's a community that needs help from lots of different organizations. So I think everybody together is really targeting them and helping. Yeah. You're right. There's been a lot of organizations that have been focusing on them. We still have a low graduation rate for blacks and African-Americans, 47%. And then our American Indian population is 35%. And for whites and Caucasians, it's 84.5%. We have been trying to address this through primetime. In 2005, we started a bilingual primetime. And the bilingual primetime is in both English and Spanish. And we're targeting our Spanish-speaking families. And all reading is done in English and Spanish. And all discussion is done in English and Spanish. And to go back to the parents who struggle with English, they have commented in surveys that they really like the bilingual format, because not only do they understand then the discussion and they understand what their children are doing, but it also helps them with their English. And it gives them an opportunity to practice their English. And it's really exciting when a Spanish-speaking parent tries to answer a question in English or when they come over to me when I'm there, and I start speaking to them in Spanish, and they start speaking to me in English, and it's just a nice little exchange. So they do like that it is in English and Spanish, because it helps them with their English. And do all the people who work in the primetime program speak Spanish then? Not all of them. The bilingual program. Not all of them. We always have someone who is fluent in Spanish. You absolutely have to have some. And the storyteller discussion leader team, who is fluent in Spanish, we often have other team members who are fluent in Spanish. We also have people who don't know Spanish very well, who might not know Spanish at all, who are just fluent in English. And I think it's good to have those people in the team, too, because it reminds Spanish speakers, hey, let's keep the English language in primetime. Let's not just do a Spanish language primetime, let's keep the English, because that's important in these bilingual primetimes. Because it is bilingual. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Primetime has two goals, and the first goal is to introduce families to reading. We do this by encouraging parents and children to bond through reading and learning together. There are families... I love this photograph here. Is this one of your real photographs, or is this a stock photo? No, this is a real one. This is from Lincoln. This is from Eisley Branch Library in Lincoln. I love it. I've talked with parents who don't get this, because this is what they do with their children. And they don't understand that, for some families, this just isn't a habit. But for some families, they don't think of it as a habit to sit down with their children and read to them. And so that's one of our goals for primetime. And that's why we need to stick with the target audience. We demonstrate to parents how they can read aloud to their children, because some of them don't know how to do that. And they don't know how to really get their children involved with the story. We teach them how to discuss important issues using the books as a backdrop. A lot of the times, even for parents who make it a habit to read to their children, they might stick with the questions that are just the details of the story about what so-and-so did and what so-and-so was doing. And we really dive into the issues of the story. Why did somebody do this? And what would you have done if you were in this situation? We teach families how to select books. We tell them what all those award stickers on their books mean and how to select books by looking at what awards, the Caldecott Award, for instance. We try to foster a lot of reading. And we try to, and by doing this, we encourage high academic expectations because reading and writing and talking about books is so important when you're in school. We have, primetime is centered around many different themes. We have a lot of different books under a lot of different themes. And each week of primetime, you have one theme and two or three books around that theme. And these are some of the themes we use. We talk about fairness and justice. We talk about greed and generosity, determination, courage. Courage is a big theme when you're talking about a bilingual primetime because some of these families that have immigrated to the United States have had to have a lot of courage and determination to get here. And they talk about their dreams, why they came to the United States, what their children want for their own future, and then the parents also talk to their children about what they had wanted when they were children. We talk about what it means to be family and what it means to be loyal. We talk about identity and how you react to differences and how you react to others. On a previous slide, we were talking about the graduation rates and I forgot to talk about something. We don't just do the bilingual primetime anymore. We used to just do bilingual primetime. But because this has reached out to such a great need, we also do a primetime for African Americans, which is English only. And we are now developing a primetime for American Indians, which we are piloting this fall in Scotts Bluth. That would be very cool. Yeah. Is that going to address the bilingual issues in the Native American community or not right now? It'll be English only. It'll be English only as well. Right. Yeah, that would be really good to do a bilingual one, but that would be so cool. Because it would depend on being able to find the right people to work with. Right. You know the language. Yeah. Because those children have lost their language. And the tribe is struggling to keep their language going. So yeah, that is definitely a need. Wow. These are some good numbers. Yes. At every primetime, we ask the families to complete an entry survey on the very first week of primetime. And then we do a completion survey during the last week of primetime. And then 90 days after primetime, we give them a call to see how they're doing and ask them questions. And so these are the results of goal one. After participating in primetime, do you read with your child more often? And at the sixth week of primetime, 90% said that yes, they read with their child more often. And we think, well, of course, because they're bringing home books every week for the six weeks. And this is what they've been doing. And so 90 days later, we ask them, are you reading with your child more often now after primetime? And 85% said yes, we are. And that's great. And we have other questions on the survey because we don't want these surveys to reflect what the families think we want to hear. And so we have other questions, too. And all of those questions reflect that this is correct, that they do read more often with their children after primetime. Has primetime changed the way you and your child read and discuss books? Because we're trying to show them how to read and interact with the child while reading the read-aloud techniques. And also, we want them to discuss those real-life issues they find in the books. And so we're measuring here if they're reading and discussing differently. And during the six week of primetime, 88% said yes, we do read differently. And we discuss differently. And then 90 days later, 82%. And so that's really encouraging, I think. Are there any questions so far? If you have questions, you can either use your microphone or you can type in the question category. I'm monitoring it, yep. Which Krista is monitoring. So she will pass along those questions that come up in the question category typed in right away to Erica. Real time. Well, if there's no questions, we'll move on to goal number two, introducing families to libraries. Because as I said, these families aren't very familiar with the libraries. Our target audience, they're not very familiar with it. Back in 2006, I believe, we had a focus group in South Omaha. And one of the questions we asked them are, Hispanics and Latinos are afraid to use the library. And the parents said, yes, they are. Yes, they are afraid. They're afraid of not being understood. Because when you go into the library, there's not a lot of Spanish-speaking librarians. Probably something the libraries need to work on for their own staff. Yeah, they have been. Yeah. They have been. And the double fear is not only will they not be understood, but they won't be able to find what they need. And they're not familiar with the librarian. So they don't feel like they can approach the librarian. And so what prime time school is, is to show the families that the libraries are safe. These families are coming from cultures where government buildings are very scary. And even in the United States, when they're immigrants and when there's a lot of questions about illegal immigration, government buildings are very scary. And they think of libraries as government buildings. And so they want to stay away. But through prime time, with the librarians actively involved in talking with the families during dinner and presenting the library commercials, those families start to get to know the librarians. And the librarians, after six weeks, they become more approachable. They become mentors. And even if there is a language gap, at least the families know your face. They know your face. They know you're nice. They know you're not going to fuss at them. And so the librarian becomes more approachable. And then the families realize the libraries are safe places to go, that they're not a scary place. They also find out the libraries are free. Because in their countries, the libraries are not free. They have to pay. And they're for the elite. They're for the rich folks. And so they need to break through that misunderstanding and get to know that libraries are free, that they can check out materials. I love this picture. You might not be able to see that's Pat Leach with the big glasses on. And Vicki. Yeah, they're doing a library commercial, by the way. They're doing a commercial on what you can and cannot get at the library. And the big glasses are things you cannot check out at the library. And the books that Vicki is holding are things you can check out at the library. Looks like Pat Lee's carrying a dog. You can't check out this dog at the library. She might very well be. I think she has a bag in her hand. Has primetime changed your family's attitude towards the library? 60 days, not 60 days, but during the sixth week of primetime, 75% said yes, that their attitude had changed. And 73%, 90 days later, said yes. And I do want to make a little note about these percentages. These percentages are actually pretty good. Our benchmark is 74%. And so it just meets it. And it's also very good when you consider that some of these primetimes are being held in public schools or community centers. They're not being held in the public library. We have higher percentages from primetimes that are actually held in the library. The one in the library, partners with a school who is holding primetime or partners with a community center, then that helps raise the percentages too, because that librarian, even though they're not holding primetime in their library, they're still involved in the library commercials. And so that helps introduce the families to the library. And also, primetime that's being held in schools, I often encourage them to maybe do their last week in the library, take a tour of the library so they can see what's there. This is great outreach for libraries. There are several essential components. There's a lot of optional things and a lot of things that are necessary to do primetime. One thing we need, and we were just talking about that before the session. Where do you put all the books? I mean, I know they rotate around from place to place, but there's got to be a lot of them sitting in your office sometimes. Yeah. As I said, you use five themes, and you either have two books or three books per theme. You get 30 copies of each title. And so that's a lot of books you get. So it's 30 about the max number of families that you could possibly work with then. Well, we try to keep it at 30 because if you get more than 30 families, it gets unwieldy. It's hard to do a discussion when you have that many people. And so that's, and you don't get to keep them. They're actually being borrowed from the library from the Nebraska Humanities Council. So the Humanities Council sends a site and lets you borrow all of these books. And then we pay for the shipping to send them to you and to send them back to us. But I try to keep, I try to expand with new themes and new books each year, because if you've done primetime for four years, five years, and you've done twice a year, you need new things to talk about. Can you give us an example of what the themes might be, like just example? Well, one of the newest themes I added just this summer is identity. Who am I? I have included Stella Luna in that because with Stella Luna, and actually Stella Luna fits both of my new themes. I have identity and encountering others. How do you respond to differences? Because with Stella Luna in the book, she's doing both of that. She's trying to figure out who she is because she is a bat who has lost her mother. She's landed in this bird's nest. And she's being raised by birds. And so she has this identity crisis. Is she a bat or is she a bird? And so she fits really well in both themes because you can talk about her struggle to figure out who she is. But you can also talk about responding to differences because she's responding to the birds and the bird's ability to fly during the day and eat worms. And the birds are responding to her ability to hang upside down and fly at night because they can't see at night. So that's an example of the themes in the books. We also have encountering others go in someplace special, which is about African American girl during segregation. And she's trying to get to the library because the library is a safe place to go. And all the places around her aren't safe because it's still in the south and it's still during segregation. She's trying to make her way to the library, which is a safe place for her to go. It's a special place for her. The storyteller and the discussion leader are absolutely essential. These are people who I hire. I contract with them in order to make sure primetime remains its quality. And they're two different people. They're two different people. The storyteller and the discussion leader. And during a bilingual primetime, one or both of them must be fluent in Spanish. And if one isn't fluent in Spanish, that's okay because they can nudge the fluent one and say, hey, what do you mean? Can you repeat that in English? And that way we keep primetime bilingual. We have a preschool coordinator for younger siblings. This is very important, once again, for breaking down the barriers, as I said. We break down barriers by providing a meal. We provide a preschool coordinator for the younger siblings who are ages three to five, who are too restless for primetime, but who would still benefit from pre-reading activities. And we also provide transportation for those families. Maybe they have one car and their car is being used by the mother or the father for a night job. And so how do they get to primetime? When we provide transportation, either we pay for a van or some libraries contract with taxi companies. And so through our funding, they're able to pay for the taxi. We already talked about the meals and publicity materials. How do you get the families to know the Nebraska Humanities Council to ship each site paper, stationary, so they can print out their brochures and flyers on primetime. But with the bilingual primetime, keep in mind that that is the least best way. That's not a very good way at all to attract an audience. You really have to go word of mouth with the Spanish-speaking families. The certificates are for certificates of completion and certificates of appreciation. You can give your funders. And you're not going to go all this alone. You're not going to do all this alone because we do have a pretty thick site support manual that Louisiana provides to us. And so every new site coordinator, I give them a site support manual, answers all their questions, and I'm also available. I go to a new site. I sit with the new site coordinator for a couple hours and we just go through the steps for implementing primetime. So you're not going through this alone. Plus we do training workshops and idea exchanges. We haven't had one in a while. One is being planned. But that's when everyone who's involved in primetime in Nebraska, anyone who's available gets together in one spot. We train the new people and the people who have been around primetime for a while, get together, exchange ideas with the new people, exchange ideas with each other. And so we have a lot of cross-pollination, I guess, among the primetime sites. Do you do any of that in a webinar like this, or is it all live in person? We like to do it live in person just so they get to know each other. We've had a lot of success stories and I've heard a lot of stories from other primetime discussion leaders or storytellers or site coordinators about how they remember so-and-so from such place because they brought this wonderful homemade salsa stuff like that. And so you get a really good support system throughout the state when you've actually met each other. I also implemented something new last year where I have traditionally traveled to each site for one week. And that's another way I support site sites is that I visit every primetime for one week and let you know how things are going. I ask you how things are going. If you have questions or concerns, we try to talk those through. I let you know this is what you're doing great, this is what you can work on. And now someone else, a guest evaluator comes with me and it's either a site coordinator or a storyteller or a discussion leader who has not worked with the site I'm visiting who comes and gives their experience. So it's sort of a mini idea exchange and that's worked very well. That's a great idea. It's a lot of fun. That is a great idea because that really enriches the site visit to have a guest evaluator involved. I do have a question here about your I guess idea exchanges. Do coordinators from other states communicate with each other about books themes and new ideas? There is an avenue to do that, yes. There is a listserv, a national listserv that once you become a primetime team member you get put on this listserv. So if you have questions about primetime you can post them on the listserv and then you get answers from all over the nation. It's good to hear how people are doing outside of the country or something. Unfortunately we don't have a big national reunion which would be very fun. Everyone gets a good New Orleans or something. Louisiana. There are national trading workshops but those are from people who are new to primetime. We have sent a few people to Louisiana to be trained but what happens is that Nebraska has developed different forms and different procedures than Louisiana because primetime is not a one size fits all sort of program. What works in Omaha doesn't always work in Scotts Bluff even. What works in Louisiana doesn't work in Nebraska and one example of that is that in Louisiana primetime was developed for the libraries because their primary audience was African-Americans. African-Americans did not trust their schools but they trusted their libraries. That's how primetime became for libraries. When you talk about Spanish speaking families as I mentioned, they don't trust their libraries at all but they trust their schools. You got to tweak it. That's why it's partnering with the school. Even if you're a library and you're doing it in the library getting a liaison from the school is priceless. It really helps with your equipment. Who is the storyteller I keep talking about? We have lots of storytellers throughout the state. This happens to be Ricardo Garcia who was one of our first primetime storytellers. Actually, he was our first one in Lincoln in 2004. Storytellers have a broad knowledge of children's literature. They're comfortable working with non-traditional audiences. They demonstrate storytelling and read aloud techniques. This is really important. They're comfortable sharing the stage. If you know Ricardo you know he's a professional storyteller. Sometimes with professional storytellers they're not used to sharing the stage with anybody. Unfortunately for us, Ricardo is very comfortable with sharing a stage. Children's librarians make really good storytellers for primetime. Elementary school teachers make good storytellers for primetime. The storyteller needs to be a good listener because primetime is not about the performance. It's not about the storyteller. It's about the audience and the discussion and what they have to offer to primetime. Of course, you have to have fun. You have to have fun at primetime. Primetime is not a stoic, brownie place but a fun place. The discussion leader has an advanced degree in the humanities field. In Louisiana, this is not a one-size-fits-all, because in Louisiana you have to have a PhD. If you get to western Nebraska PhDs become a little hard to find. We have been a little bit more flexible and who can be a discussion leader. Either if they have a master's degree or just a college degree as long as they show the other requirements of being a discussion leader. They must be eager to transmit a love of reading and talking about books and be enthusiastic about it. They need to be comfortable working with intergenerational at-risk audience. This is especially important when you get a professor who is being a discussion leader. They need to be working with children and adults who are not the general audience that they see at their college. They need to be comfortable asking open-ended questions because primetime is not a right or wrong program. It's and that's because of the questions we're asking. Who are you? What would you do? Who is family? What does loyalty mean? What is greed? Those aren't closed-ended questions. Those don't have a right or wrong answer. Those are the kind of primetime questions we want and the discussion leader needs to become very, very adept and very comfortable doing that. Then they have to be a good listener because a discussion leader might have all of their questions planned out and they might want to go this way. But if something really good comes out of one of those, you know, a mom or a dad or a child, you've got to run with it. Key facilitation skills. Not doing a lecture. Yeah, you're not on a soapbox. The best primetime is when you can throw out a question and then step back because the families are going at it and they're bouncing off each other and that's kind of difficult to do with families who are really shy and who might not know each other very well. But if you can get them going and if you have some families in the group who've been involved in primetime a couple times, they used to it. And so you do have repeat performance. We do have repeats. Wonderful, that's good. And I don't discourage repeats. I don't discourage them because in the very first few weeks when the families don't know what they're supposed to be doing to have families there who know what they're supposed to be doing is very helpful and encouraging. Yeah, we do have repeats. In fact, we do have a statistic on that. 60% of families are brand new to primetime and 40% are coming back. Coming back. So if you are interested in being a site, this is what sites do. And this is the librarian in the site or usually as a site coordinator. Yeah. The program coordinator's site coordinator is most of the time the director of the library or the branch. Most of the time. Sometimes as a children's librarian. But this is a big job. Getting primetime ready is a big job. And so if a library director is too busy or needs a little help, we have some help available. If a library wants to hire out and get a program coordinator who's not from the library, we can help fund that. But a lot of times librarians like to keep it within their library and plan it out themselves. Now working with community agencies. As I said, a lot of this target family is not comfortable with coming into the library. So you have to go out. What are compadres? Compadres are the people who those families go to, their literacy agencies, their school liaisons, ELL teachers, anybody in the community who those families go to, those are compadres. Getting them involved in primetime is incredibly important. Recruiting volunteers because a lot goes on during primetime and it's very helpful to have a lot of different volunteers. Providing a staff member to serve as coordinator, providing nutritious meals, arranging transportation, identifying the preschool coordinator and identifying other team members. Who are those other team members? I'm going to talk about them a little bit. As I said, primetime is a big job for just one person to do. And so it's very smart for a program coordinator to bring a team on to help with them with the different tasks. Back in 2005, I was in this very room. The table was situated a little bit differently, but I was giving a presentation on primetime. I think it was Mary Jo. Who said, is there an opportunity that maybe student interns can be involved with primetime? And certainly, and so we've been doing this for five years now. We've had the opportunity for libraries to have a student intern. And this is for public libraries only. We don't offer these to elementary schools. We just offer these to the libraries. It's a 55 to 60 hour internship. The Nebraska Humains Council pays the intern. We ask for a high school or lower level college student, somebody who doesn't quite know what career path they're going to choose. We and we ask for a student intern who's a member of the target audience. So if it's a bilingual primetime, we want an intern from a Spanish-speaking family. If it's an African-American primetime student intern, that's African-American. And that's because of the goal, the last goal point there is to encourage minority students to consider a library for a nice little side effect. We've had some great results from that too. Some great comments have come from those students saying how much they understand library work now versus people. And we've had some really good success stories with student interns. We had Scott's Bluff had the very first student intern and she brought her family along to see primetime and the whole family fell in love with it. The mother became a volunteer. She started helping out even when her daughter's ritual for primetime she was still helping out. And now she is the primetime storyteller for Scott's Bluff. It's worked out very well. Student intern helps with primetime work, but they also help with general library work because we want them to get to know what it's like to work in a library. And I must thank the Nebraska Library Commission for the initial funding to keep that going. Happy to do it. But even with the student intern, sometimes it was a little bit too much work for the program coordinator, especially when it came to recruiting families and trying to get inside that target audience. And so the community liaison was born in Nebraska and this wasn't a new idea. The student intern is unique to Nebraska. No other state in the nation has a student intern for primetime. The community liaison in Nebraska was a little slow getting one as part of the team. But we do now fund the community liaison. It's an insider to primetime's target audience. And they work to recruit the families because the families trust them. They know them already. And so it's a little less work for the librarian to break into that. And the librarians had told me how difficult it was. They would go to a church to try to get flyers out. And because they don't go to that church they might not be able to see the pastor or they'd talk to the pastor and then maybe their flyers didn't get distributed. If you have an insider it's a lot easier. Community liaison makes phone calls. Primetime sites will send reminder phone calls to the family each week to remind them to come. And they also agree to check and it's a friendly face. When those families get to the library and they come to the check-in table it's very nice to see someone they know. Is this a volunteer or is this a contract position? It's a contract position. We do pay the community liaison. The Nebraska Humanities Council does. And I should say that this primetime can be done. So it does not cost the library anything. That it could be completely covered by the Nebraska Humanities Council unless you spend money on door prizes which we don't cover or if you spend money on preschool supplies which we don't cover. You don't require a match then. Except all the work. Except all the work. The entire time is quite a match. Yeah. But that's another barrier though. Primetime is a little not primetime. Libraries have limited budget. Libraries have limited budget. And at first we were going to have them pay for 75% of primetime and 50% and by we were hoping to wean them off Humanities Council funding. What we found was that libraries were scared of that because they weren't able to fund the primetime without Humanities Council support. And because we do receive state funding according to the Nebraska Humanities Council there are several reasons but one of the reasons is it allows us to provide primetime to libraries that could not otherwise afford it. That's very important to very small libraries as well. Volunteers can help with circulating book bags keeping track of the books registering participants as they come in donating and preparing the food. Some of you might be wondering how much food the Nebraska Humanities Council pays for food up to $1,200. So you can order from Hy-Vee. You can get a donation from RUNZA maybe go to a local restaurant, go to a local grocery store. Some sites have had incredible luck with one week as a potluck where the families bring food and they haven't been to one of those yet. I really want to go. But that's an idea for a week. Probably not the first week. No, not the first week. That's usually around the fifth or the sixth week when all the families know each other by now. And then a preschool program activity is that preschool coordinator needs help rounding up the children. So usually two or three volunteers to help the preschool. We actually had a question about the preschool program. But maybe not in detail, the question was are you planning developing a program especially, I guess I mean just for preschool age? Isn't this what you're talking about generally part of the program for the older children? Primetime is for children ages 6 to 10. Pre-school is for 3 to 5. We do not have a separate program for ages 3 to 5. We've talked about it. We've talked about developing it. We're not even in the development stage yet. But you do do something for them when they come along with their older siblings so they're not left out. Also for the families they don't have to say well I can't because little one needs to be watched. There's always going to be a preschool program and we do have guidelines for activities. There is a preschool coordinator handbook with ideas based on the different themes. We like for the preschool coordinators to use one of the books that the other families have been discussing so that when everyone goes home the older kids, the adults and the smaller children have all been thinking about the same book. But in different levels maybe the children were read the book and then they did a craft in an activity related to the book. Cool. Did that answer that question? I think so. So if you have another question about the preschool program, be sure and type it in if we didn't give you what you were wondering about. Some more statistics about prime time. 100% of families who attend prime time at libraries have library cards by the sixth week. Why do you think that is? That's part of the library commercial. Absolutely. That very first week you hand out if they don't have library cards you hand out applications and sometimes during the second week or the third week they get their library card. That's why. Before attending prime time in 2009, 31% of families reported they used the public library three or more times per month. 90 days after the statistic jumped to 62% it doubled. That shows that we're still going to the library even after prime time. And we talked about repeats. 98% what more family activities like prime time. They either want to go to prime time or they would like the library to do more activities like it. One thing I want to say about our surveys especially our completion surveys is that we do include questions that are specifically for the library. We ask what library resources do you use? What would you like the library to do? And so hopefully the libraries get back some useful information that they can use as well as the Nebraska Humanities Council gets back information we use so that we can do statistics like this. I love that. I thought it was more difficult to go to the library and boring. That's terrific. I like this picture up there up here. It's not very clear because I'm not a good photographer and I didn't get a good shot. That little girl has a Doberman puppy in her lap. So it's not just for families but for puppies too. These are the whole families involved. This little boy over here is holding a packet and I haven't talked about this yet. At the very end of the sixth week we have graduation ceremony, award ceremony, whatever you want to call it. It's not really very much pomp in circumstance but what it is is that we give those certificates of completion and we also give a gift book for the families to take home and keep because throughout these six weeks we've been giving them books to bring home but they have to bring them back because they don't belong to them. They don't belong to the library. They belong to the Nebraska Humanities Council. When they get through the prime time program they get to take home this book and it's not just a book. You might not be able to see in that picture very well. It's a bag with a book. It has laminated discussion questions and a family activity and so they can take that home and it continues what they've been learning through prime time. They can read the book, talk about the book with those discussion questions and then have a little family activity to do together. So that little boy is pretty excited to attack you. They look in his face and it's just like this is the best thing ever. These are great quotes. This is a pretty long quote from Lincoln. I think it's pretty good though. It's from Pat Leach who was the coordinator of prime time in Lincoln before she became the director of Lincoln City Libraries and she's talking about the impact of prime time on the parents who don't have a lot of opportunity to get together and have this kind of conversation and Sassi City that's a quote from the library director who's now in Yankton she was very skeptical about prime time when we began and by the end of that first night she was hooked. That's all I have to share. I'm sure I have a lot more to say but that's the end of my PowerPoint. I guess one question I would have Erica is are you looking for more libraries in Nebraska to sign up for prime time or is it pretty well we're always looking for more sites. We went back to that fourth slide with I don't know how to do that with the state. I would love to get more of those open spots filled with prime time. There's a way to apply to prime time. If you go to our website wwwnebraskahumanities.org and go to our maybe we can go there. Do we have a little bit of time to get to our website? Sure we have a couple of minutes. We started a little late so we have a long time. If you want to see where the cycle is over here right here so any library in Nebraska any public library in Nebraska that's interested in potentially having the opportunity to take part in the prime time program they could go to www.nebraskahumanities.org and when they get there it looks like this and then where do you go? You go to programs and I see prime time family reading time oh and there's that same picture that's a good one it gets double billed and then there's a form is that a okay here's some information information on how to what is prime time how to become a prime time site and there's the application you need to complete the application send it in to me I will be looking to see if you're going to be reaching our target audience audience that either bilingual African American or Native American that's right I'll be looking at your communities state reading scores to see if that shows any struggle in meeting state standards about demographics if you have changing demographics census data we do ask questions about how about if somebody just wants to talk to you so they call the Humanities Council just to visit with you about it yeah calling me is the best it's 402-474-2131 and I say calling is best because if you email me I give a lot of emails and my emails just stack up and I like to talk to people I'm kind of a voice to voice person what I'm talking about about stuff so I like to talk over the phone about if you have any questions, if you have any concerns is there any particular area of Nebraska that you're seeking libraries in or are you just open to wherever well right now with our new American Indian prime time we are seeking American Indian communities that have a lot of Native Americans maybe reservation libraries but as I said if there is a need in a community we are open to that great and do you have a deadline that you want to hear from people by? yeah we don't really have any strict deadlines you cannot apply in March and have an April program right that would make some sense I do need to train I keep in mind I do need to train a side coordinator, I do need to locate a story teller, I do need to locate a discussion leader and if you're in a community that's pretty removed from another prime time community I will be working with the applicant to try to identify a story teller and discussion leader because the best the best people to help me find the story teller and discussion leader is the people who know the community already rather than me trying to cold call somebody that makes the most sense do you have contact information on here? up here there that's a phone number for you too there it is 4-7-4-2-1-3-1 I'm always happy to talk to communities who are interested in prime time there's a lot of other good things on this website it looks like there's a radio program from NET and get your book list there's lots of good resources maybe if we have a little more I'll show you books we have there's some great books on here we have different tracks different themes so if you're interested in an African American prime time and these are not actually all of our books because I've done that expansion and that's not included on here if you want to do a prime time on animal we have a lot of details we have so many books about animals we learn so much from animals as I said our Native American collection has increased since this was put on then of course because we've been doing bilingual prime time longer we have a much longer list all of our books sounds good do we have any further questions for your final their contact info the tab the second tab what is going on here I see what was going on there we go that's got contact information on it yep so any other questions from anybody in the audience I want to thank Erica Hamilton from the Nebraska Humanities Council for joining us here today and telling us all about the library for inviting me this is a great program I hope some libraries will listen in and get involved with it more thank you very much for attending today the session was recorded and we'll be available later tomorrow we'll put it out there as we usually do the PowerPoint will be posted in the line as well so all the slides went through you'll be able to download and take a look at them and the link to the Humanities Council website so you don't have to be about scribbling down all that and these slides will be great to show to your library board oh yeah I think you could follow along just like Erica did and show these to your library board there would be some enthusiasm Laura from St. Insist, thank you thanks for the presentation well thank you very much alright thank you very much we hope you'll join us next week when our topic our conducting surveys 3, analyzing data and reporting methods is the third in our three-part series that Katherine Brockmeyer here at the Library Commission is doing on doing surveys another great program from Katherine Brockmeyer on conducting surveys I know everybody's been enjoying those and part one and two are already on the recordings are up so if you need to get prepared for the part three that's coming next week you can go online and watch those wonderful cool so thank you very much and we'll see you next time bye bye