From Isolation to Reliance: School Alliance
Vaughan Public Libraries
Innovation Synopsis
Until 2023, Pierre Berton Resource Library’s relationship with Emily Carr Highschool, which shares a large campus parking lot with a community centre, was in rocky water. 2023, however, marked the turning of the tide: the library actively made consistent efforts to mend the relationship by offering the school support systems and numerous opportunities to collaborate with their students, teachers, and parents alike. Our proactive approach to consistently involve Emily Carr in all our activities, and curating school specific programming, has turned our once animosity filled relationship into a blossoming partnership that generates both student-librarian and teacher-librarian collaborative outcomes.
Challenge/Opportunity
Coming out of the pandemic offered us an opportunity to reflect and think about how the public library branch can become more valuable to our community partners—especially Emily Carr High School, which shares our campus. While the community center bans teens from entering during lunch, we instead took the opposite approach and made our first floor a “teen-centered” space during their lunch hour. This involves offering our community’s teens places to eat, engage in library activities, a quiet space to study, or just a place to relax with friends—judgment-free. We focused, furthermore, on creating value-added programs and services that would support the high school’s teachers such that they felt empowered and welcomed to engage with our resources. Through lots of consistent effort from managers, our teen advocate, and our diverse staff, we re-engaged the school on their terms and fostered a culture of belonging and cooperation.
Key Elements of Innovation
Firstly, by transforming our first floor to adapt to our shared teen population, we support an average 200-300 teens a day and their growing needs. We consciously support troubled teens with various mental and physical health services (therapy dogs, exam care packages, and informing school leadership weekly). We now host the school’s holiday and end-of-school-year concert that raises funds for the school and showcases the teen’s artistic abilities. We created a youth gallery that hosts the school’s talented teens’ fine art. After-school programs, such as teen chess club and debate club, have sparked city wide expansion from our examples. We re-engaged our teens with the ever-growing D&D club as well as numerous volunteering and leadership programs, such as our summer “Empower YOUth” summer suite. Our newfound reciprocal relationship has culminated in monthly newsletters, from both us and the school, that consistently involves teachers, parents, and the public in our shared spaces.
Achieved Outcomes
We became intertwined with the school’s curriculum and support systems through numerous avenues that have yielded astounding year-over-year results. This includes an average of 1000+ weekly student visitors. Two concerts hosted to 300+ community members a year. Cultivating 1-on-1 personalized relationships between students and librarians. Parents have become more engaged in the library, and thus cognizant of the school’s relationship with us and our collective efforts. Teacher and administrative leadership’s regained trust with the public library system. Pierre Berton branch has become an exemplar for our other libraries relationships with their community. Most importantly, there has been a stark contrast between previous school years insofar as students now feel welcomed and comfortable being themselves at the library—cultivating a lifelong habit of library engagement that will strengthen our growing democratic community.
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