Shevchenko School in Vita holds library night on the first Thursday of every month where all community residents are invited to come and check out books.
Melanie Mattson, a resource teacher for Shevchenko school and part of the library committee, says library night is a great chance to open up the school’s large library to the rest of the community.
“We have a beautiful library with tons of seating and lights and so many wonderful books to read, and we wanted to share that with everybody, because especially in this area, it's really hard to access books,” she says. “We wanted for everybody in the area, our community in Vita and beyond, to be able to access reading.”
Every library night, the community is welcome to come in and take out library books, then they can return them at any point during the month.
Shevchenko also does a themed library night four times over the course of the year where they welcome guest speakers and do readers theater.
“We do lots of different things involving the passion of reading. And this year we are working on our outdoor reading space, we're creating some seating out there to extend our reading to the outdoors as well.”
Mattson says it’s really important to have these evenings as often as possible, because a lot of people can’t drop by during the day.
“They'll come in after work at 5pm and exchange books. They don't have that choice to be able to be able to do it during the day. And sometimes our library is busy with our own students and our own things that are going on so the library could be closed.”
She says even if there's no school on the first Thursday of the month, they still have the library open in the evening.
“Even if we're on professional development, what has happened on a Thursday, we as teachers come back in after professional development to make sure that library night is still happening.”
Mattson says their next goal is to try and have library night twice a month. They’re hoping that it will be possible next year, but she says it takes a lot of manpower and volunteer hours.
The next community library night is May 4.