Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 8, 1994 TAG: 9409080039
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Beth Macy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"They'd go shelf to shelf, pushing in the books," librarian Becky Cooper recalls. "Anything they could think of, they'd do."
That changed a few months ago - a little. The Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority finally erected a park across from the Landsdowne development to replace the old one it had torn down for a parking lot.
Now there are four basketball hoops, a picnic shelter, swings, a softball field, a jungle gym with slides. Now the kids from Lands-downe cross Salem Turnpike and play one-on-one in the late afternoons when it's not too hot. Now, when they cut across the field behind Forest Park Elementary to buy a soda at the Z-mart store, they sit and drink it on the swing set.
They still come inside to the library, but not to read or check out books, or even to play hide-and-seek. Now they use the library for its drinking fountain and bathroom.
"I'm pro-park, I am; it enhances the library," Cooper says.
But the mess these kids leave behind - the empty soda cans by the swing set, the toilet paper on the library floor - illustrates a larger need that a playground itself can't possibly fill:
Attention. Guidance. Someone to teach them how to play basketball, someone to supervise a rec league, someone to be there when a kid hangs on the rim and pulls down the basketball net.
Someone like Cooper, who takes the time to correct them when they throw trash on the floor. "My mother instinct comes out, and I do my `respect talk.'
"I tell them about the woman who cleans up at night. I tell them this is her second job, and she's tired and she doesn't need the extra work of picking up behind them. I ask them, `Now would you want your mother to have to do that?'"
Cooper stands at the library's front door, watching two kids shoot baskets, watching the litter tumble in the breeze. She was working at the main library downtown two years ago - and hearing stories about how unruly the kids at the Melrose branch had become - when she volunteered to switch locations.
Cooper is black. A librarian for 22 years, she grew up in nearby Forest Park. The new principal at Forest Park Elementary used to be her library page. For these reasons, she says, the kids relate to her.
From the glass front door, she watches 12-year-old B.J. - who was banned last week from the library for fighting - swish one from outside the key. She sees 14-year-old Shalena toss her empty popcorn bag in the mulch and then join the game.
"These kids need to be taken out and shown things. A lot of them know the civic center, they know McDonald's. But they don't even know where the post office is or how to use it.
"We're killing their need to learn by always giving them something to do without any real guidance or mentoring to back it up," she says.
Cooper looks at the new white basketball nets. The housing authority put new ones up for last week's dedication ceremonies - because kids had already torn the originals down.
She doesn't give the new nets long before they're torn down again.
Before she knows it, the kids might even be back inside again playing hide and seek in the stacks.
A basketball court is a wonderful thing, but it's a poor substitute for a parent, a mentor, or even a branch librarian who's tired of telling kids to pick up their trash.
by CNB