When I was a kid, the after school hours worked a bit differently than they do now.  My mom didn’t work outside the home (except for a part-time gig for a few years teaching at a preschool), so most afternoons she was home when I got off the bus.  We had a big back yard bordering on woodlands, so I could go outside after grabbing a snack and run around and play with the neighborhood kids (or by myself) while Mom did her thing inside.  On the days that Mom wasn’t home when I got off the bus, I’d sit on the front steps and wait for her.

Things are a bit different now, obviously.  A lot more moms work full-time and can’t be home to greet the school bus when it arrives.  And every day there are scary stories about kids being abducted from their driveways or streets or yards – those woodlands of my childhood home would look a lot more sinister to a parent today than they did to my mom, and sitting alone on the front steps just wouldn’t be safe anymore.

Because times have changed, there are kids who can’t go home after school, and end up spending their afternoons in the local library waiting for their parents to finish work.  These are great kids; I’ve gotten to know a lot of them in the town where I work, and they are smart and interesting and creative.  But they’re also kids, who have been sitting in school all day and who are itching to do something beside SIT and be QUIET all afternoon.  I don’t blame these kids one bit – when I was a kid, I needed to run and be active after a long day of education.  And I don’t blame their parents, either – Jim and I keep delaying parenthood because we can’t imagine how we could afford it, even with both of us working full time.  But the fact is that the library needs to be a quiet place for the people who go there to study and research.  So what to do?

We’ve been running a Thursday afternoon game hour, run by teen volunteers, that has become pretty popular.  It’s a good outlet to be kind of loud and have fun playing games in a safe atmosphere.  So there’s an hour on Thursday taken care of.  On most Tuesdays I run book groups, but those are grade specific (the fifth grade group meets only once a month, and so on), and let’s face it, book groups are still a bit like school.  But at least they’re fairly popular.  So there’s Tuesday afternoons taken care of, as best I can.

But what of Wednesday and Friday afternoons?  The library closes at five on both days, so any activity I add would have to be finished up by 4:30 or 4:45.  Mondays I have a bit more leeway, since we’re open until nine.  And there’s also the issue of staffing, since I really do have other tasks that I need to be accomplishing besides running programs: I need to order books, I need to assist patrons who need help finding books, I need to plan storytimes and coordinate volunteers, and any number of other tasks.  Mary tells me that we have been gifted a soccer ball, which we could “check out” for kids to use on the front lawn; maybe we need to invest in a few other basic pieces of sports equipment, like a frisbee and a football, that could also be loaned out.  I’m not really sure what the solution is, but would like to spend less of my time “speaking to” kids who are really good people, just in need of some structuring of their free time.