Ms. Cashore,

Thank you for writing Fire. That is all.

Sincerely,
Jill Jarrell

This past Tuesday evening 80 teens participated in our Library Skate Night at Skate City! Skate City sponsored the teen summer reading program by giving us a private party with free tickets to 4 hours of skating with skate rentals included! Skate City even provided a bus to pick up 17 teens from the Fountain Library, our southern most branch. The Skate City staff were very friendly and accommodating and went out of their way to make sure that library staff and teens had a great time.

This summer PPLD has the wonderful opportunity to participate in the Summer Work Experience Program through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This program was developed to give young adults ages 16-24 valuable work experience in high-demand fields. For many of the young adults participating in this program, this is their first job and their first opportunity to gain work experience.

There's a rampant philosophy of sorts running around libraries these days concerning teens. Plan programming that's just for fun and once they're in the door they'll pick up some books and be back. The East Teen Center has been open for about a year and a half and I was afraid that the ETC was proving this mantra to be false. For the most part I see teens who come to the teen center to read and to study and then I see teens who come in to play video games. I don't often see the two cross these invisible lines. In fact, I was rather disheartened to see comments from the last ETC survey like, "get the geeks out of here" when asked how we could make the ETC better. I'm also not sure if that comment was calling the readers and studiers "geeks" or vice-versa :)

My teen services team is currently developing a new strategic plan to direct the next several years of service. In an attempt to keep our strategic plan feasible we've decided on four seemingly simple goals. When I first started this position 5 years ago, we created the first ever teen services strategic plan for this district and unfortunately were mandated by the higher-ups to design our plan as a mirror to the library's plan. The plan became a behemoth that was quickly set aside and referred to only in reports and presentations.