City Librarian Kicks Off Tenure With Kids & Kits

There’s something especially cool and new to check out at — and check out from — the New Haven Free Public Library: See-through backpacks with books bundled with related toys, games, manipulables, all on a single theme like ​“My Pizza Shop” or ​“Me and My Emotions.”

And you can check out these ​“kits” for the earliest readers just as you do a book, hoist it on your back — or on your kid’s back — and go home and help your child develop his or her reading skills and maybe even a love for books at a very young age, and have fun doing it.

That’s why on Monday, her first day on the job, new City Librarian Maria Bernhey made a bee line to the new Early Literacy Corner, a cozy spot on the second floor of the Ives Main Branch on Elm Street where a dozen of the new diaphanous kits — a way to expand literacy beyond the library — sat invitingly on the shelves, their first day available.

Bernhey, who began her career, as did her predecessor John Jessen, as a children’s librarian (though in the New York Public Library system), also read to kids Monday morning. 

She helped to lead the warm-up singing and playing games and ringing bells prologue to the reading as well, part of the regular Monday morning ​“Stay and Play” program; it unfolds each Monday at 11:00 a.m. for young children and their families all across the five libraries in the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) system.

And it’s part of the effort Bernhey said she is committed to leading during her tenure, a larger library-wide and city-wide effort to reverse the severe, pandemic-induced literacy slides among New Haven kids of all ages.

“This is the early literacy center,” she said, ​“part of the mayor’s initiative to support literacy for school age kids, but we also think it begins at birth.”

Or, as she put it in kid-talk (with the help of Young Minds Librarian Sharon Breslow, and, btw, reader, feel free to sing along), ​“If you’re ready for a story, clap your hands. (Clap clap!) If you’re ready for a story, stomp your feet!”

And 15 adorable toddlers, along with their parents and caretakers, in a semi-circle on the rainbow carpet featuring colors, numbers, and letters, did precisely that.

Among them were James Glatt and his daughters Lily, age four, and two-year-old Elle, who walk and stroller over from home in Wooster Square every Monday morning.

“We take 15 books out [each week],” he said as he and Lily gathered some right before the reading session commenced. ​“We show up often enough so we don’t even know the limit.” (It’s 30!)

In addition to focusing on children’s literacy, Bernhey said she hopes to have the branches, which are all currently open Monday through Saturday, also open on Sunday. While the city provided money in last year’s budget to make that possible, ​“We did not have the staffing,” Bernhey said.

The hope is for that to be soon remedied, said library Public Services Administrator Rory Martorana, with job postings for about half a dozen library positions having just closed due to a full complement of applicants.

Bernhey’s large goal for the library is also to continue its advance for inclusiveness (the book she chose to read to the kids was All Are Neighbors by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman), and that includes what Martorana called ​“digital equity:” More computers and work sites, infrastructure and additional staffing, to help people access the internet, write those resumes, navigate social media, and prepare for those job interviews.

Martorana said that there is a kind of recurring core of 20 or 30 people who already use these services, but her guess is that there are a lot more folks out there who do not have the equipment or perhaps even the awareness of what’s available at the library, and it’s among her and Bernhey’s priorities to reach out and corral some of them in.

“We serve people who come in here,” Martorana said rhetorically, but what about those who do not?

To that end Martorana said two part time staff have just been hired through a city $250,000 grant in partnership with CfAL, a digital inclusion organization in town, and specifically assigned for this kind of outreach.

There are also 31 new hot spots the library has for checking out, devices that borrowers can take home if there’s no internet connectivity where they live.

Finally, Martorana cited a program she’s been reviewing in Stamford where librarians have become digitally mobile: They take computers and hot spots to, for example, barbershops, wherever the people are.

That may be in the library’s inclusiveness future too. You never know. 

It was all this reporter could do, however, to resist checking out one of those backpack kits. But which would it be? Me and My Emotions or Fish Country or Seasons of the Year or My Pizza Store?

Bernhey said it’s her hope that the kits, which were piloted over the last year or so by Soma Mitra, who was then a children’s librarian at the Mitchell library in Westville and is now in the central administration, will soon be available in all the NHFPL’s branches.