“The buzz word in Ohio is collaboration to save money,” Carroll said. “And that is where this idea was born.”
Carroll said the Trenton library’s facility at 21 E. State St. has about 2,500 square feet of space and is open 52 hours a week. Its expenditures for 2011 amounted to $243,508.16.
Carroll said moving to the new high school would “nearly triple” the space to more than 6,000 square feet and the hours of operation would increase to 66 per week for “essentially” the same cost, although she estimates that one-time start-up fees could be $25,000 to $50,000.
“Our preference would be to have a facility in the city,” Carroll said. “But that doesn’t exist and we can’t afford to build a new one.”
The library has been in its current building since 1998, she said. It has an operational agreement with the city, which owns the building.
Carroll made a presentation to the Edgewood Board of Education at its meeting on Monday.
“This is in the very (early) stage,” said school district spokesperson John Thomas. “The thought is that if we can share services that work for everyone then we should at least look at it, but there is a process that we have to go through.”
The new high school is scheduled to open for the 2012-13 school year and Carroll said the plan would be to have the library ready at that time.
Concerns have already surfaced, however, about the safety of students being mixed with the public during school hours.
“We’ve worked out a way where the public would have a separate entrance and they would be tightly supervised,” Carroll said. “Certainly, our priority would be to make the students safe every hour of every day.
“I think this would be a good move for us and I believe the benefits outweigh the negatives,” she added. “There are libraries across the nation where this works, but if we can’t make that assurance absolute, then we won’t go forward.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2852 or Skip.Weaver@coxinc.com.
About the Author