Twelve-year-old Sekondi Landry has spent the past two days walking up and down Candler Road, collecting signatures to save the DeKalb County library he goes to every day.
Landry said he didn't know the Scott Candler Library was closing at the end of the month and he wants to stop it.
County commissioners said they didn't know the library was closing either, despite voting to cut $3 million from the library system’s budget this year.
Interim County Library Director Alison Weissinger said there is no option: on April 1, the library on McAfee Road will close and many of the other 22 county branches will see reductions in hours.
“We don’t have a lot of choice,” she said. “I’m kind of stunned that they said they didn’t know.”
After reading about the library’s pending closure in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, county commissioners said they want the library system to reconsider.
“The budget committee did not recommend closing the [Candler] library and I think it’s a mistake,” Commissioner Larry Johnson said. “This is a high unemployment area and this is a resource for them to try and find some employment. If you want to close for 10 months, what are these folks going to do?”
Last month, the commission rejected a tax hike and voted to cut $33.6 million from this year’s budget, including $3 million or 22 percent from libraries funds.
In response, the library board of trustees voted last week to close the Scott Candler branch and reduce hours at the others, including cutting Sunday hours at the Wesley Chapel, Chamblee and Tucker branches. Four other smaller libraries -- Brookhaven, Embry Hills, Gresham and Lithonia-Davidson -- will now be closed on Fridays and Saturdays.
The board chose to close Scott Candler because a new library will open several blocks down the street in about a year. Until the new branch opens, the closest branches, Gresham and Flat Shoals, are each about two miles away, Weissinger said.
The closure and reduced hours will also allow the county to rotate staff to open three new branches -- Hairston Crossing, Salem-Panola and Stonecrest -- that were just constructed.
“We’re at a situation now where if we open something, we have to close something,” Weissinger said.
The library system is budgeted for 290 staff positions. However, with the cuts, they have about 240 positions now.
The cuts also mean no new books and many newspaper and magazine subscriptions will end. The books and materials budget, which was $2.4 million in 2008, has been cut to $100,000 this year.
Last year, DeKalb closed the Briarcliff Library.
Elsewhere, Gwinnett cut its library budget by $2.8 million this year, resulting in reduced hours at some libraries and other cuts..
A Cobb County spokesman said there are no current proposals to cut libraries there, but no final decisions have been made on the budget, which faces a $28 million shortfall.
In DeKalb, the staff at Scott Candler greets all visitors at the door and informs them of the pending closure. The library is waiting for a sign to be finished to hang on the door.
Landry and his great grandfather, Nathan Knight, learned about the closing Tuesday.
“He said, ‘Granddad, they can’t close library. We got to do something,'” said Knight, who owns a beauty salon across the street. “He started to put together a petition immediately and in two days, he got 76 signatures.”
Landry, who was born with one arm, said he wanted to be like his "granddaddy," who grew up marching for civil rights.
“This will be a shock if this library closes,” Knight said. “We're hoping this is some sort of April Fool's joke because this is not a good time for public education all over state of Georgia. It seems like children keep getting put on the back burner.”
Michelle Williams, a manager at Cuffies Home Care, said the closure will impact the teenage residents of her group home that she brings to the library several times a week.
“We can walk here,” she said. “The boys like it because it’s close and they can come here to use the computers.”
Although the county commission controls funding for the library system, the libraries have their own appointed board of trustees to make operational decisions. Commissioners will ask the board to reconsider the vote, but can't force any changes.
“We have to move forward,” Weissinger said. “Unless they give us more money, I don’t know what else we can do.”
About the Author
