LARCHMONT, NY – The Larchmont Public Library’s Burchell Children’s Room has been awarded a coveted LEAP (Literacy and Education in Action Program) grant by Better World Books. The grant totals just over $7,800 and will be used to develop a series of programs and collection of books and materials for children with developmental disabilities and their families.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in six children in the United States suffered from a developmental disability in 2006-2008. According to the New York State Department of Education, the Mamaroneck School District (which includes Larchmont) has a special education classification rate of nearly 10%. The Larchmont Public Library realized that this segment of population is underserved by the library and thus applied for this grant.
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The grant will fund a three-tiered program aimed at helping special needs children and their families. The first tier will provide for a series of programs called “Sensory Storytime.” These storytime programs for school-aged children, will be held on Saturday mornings twice each month beginning in September 2014, and will be led by a local Speech Language Therapist. Each hour-long storytime will incorporate a 30-minute interactive story time and a 30-minute period of play and socialization. Children and their families will be engaged through movement, music, preschool level stories and play. The play and socialization aspect of these programs is crucial as it will teach special needs children how to put the social and problem-solving skills that they learn at school into practice. “The unexpected can be a paralyzing fear for some children with special needs”, according to Rebecca Teglas, Head of Children’s Services. “Sensory Storytime will be structured to alleviate those fears.”
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The second tier will call for the development of a storytime collection of music CDs and an updating of the library’s collection of books that serve the needs of this population of children. The new collection will include DVDs and parenting materials and books about children with disabilities written for children. Additionally, because practicing motor skills is also a key component for these children’s development, the library will purchase products for the play portion of Sensory Storytime. “There are fabulous resources for teaching children with developmental disabilities,” said Teglas. “We would like to purchase them, package them together and make them available for checkout.”
The third tier provides in-service training for the library’s clerical and reference staff on how to effectively interact with special needs children and their families. This training will also explore ways to expand services to include young adults. According to Teglas, “In addition to training for our staff, this grant provides the funding necessary for us to learn how to best support the work already done by local parent organizations and schools and we’re confident that this new service will be great resource for what is currently a segment of the community underserved by the library.”
Sensory Storytime will give children a pathway to learn and a place to socialize outside of school. The new materials available in the library will offer caregivers resources to help them deal with issues and support curriculum. The in-service training provides the tools for library staff to help special needs children. Additionally, the structure of Sensory Storytime allows for measurable statistics for all three tiers. The library will be able to measure the success of the program through the collection of circulation statistics, attendance data and through the monitoring of staff interactions with library patrons. “We believe that our population of special needs children will flourish in the library long after the grant is depleted,” said Teglas.
Today’s libraries are changing rapidly in order to meet the needs of the communities they serve. Library Director, Laura Eckley, emphasizes this. “Libraries have seen tremendous change over the past twenty years and in order to remain vibrant and successful, we have to adapt to the ever-changing needs of our community. This LEAP grant allows the Larchmont Public Library to adapt in such a way as to fully serve an important segment of our population that is currently underserved by the library. We are hopeful that these new services will inspire other libraries in Westchester County to provide services directly to the special needs population.”
Better World Books was founded in 2002 by three friends from the University of Notre Dame who started selling textbooks online to earn some money, and ended up forming a pioneering social enterprise — a business with a mission to promote literacy. Every book purchased from Better World Books contributes to individual literacy throughout the world and the potential for a better life. The company supports book drives and collects used books and textbooks through a network of over 2,300 college campuses and partnerships with over 3,000 libraries nationwide. So far, the company has converted more than 117 million books into over $15 million in funding for literacy and education. In the process, more than 73,000 tons of books have been diverted from landfills. Thus far, over 10 million books have been donated to partner programs around the world through literacy partners that include Books for Africa, Room to Read, Worldfund, and the National Center for Families Learning.
To learn more about Better World Books, visit www.betterworldbooks.com. For information about the Larchmont Public Library, call 914-834-2281 or visit www.larchmontlibrary.org.
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