Please help our libraries:
I wrote this email to Governer Rendell. Please write one too.
Dear Governor Rendell,
I only just now heard about your proposed plan to cut library funding by fifty percent. Please don’t do this.
The library has always been somewhat of a sacred place to me. In my small hometown of Monongahela, PA, we had an equally small library. However, due to the funds it was given, it always had up-to-date books and computers, a quiet reading room, and tons of activities and groups in which to participate. The building was kept in repair, and it was safe. I spent most of my free time there between book clubs and chess clubs and, of course, reading. It was the one activity my mother and I could afford to do together since we didn’t have much money. Not only was it a good bonding experience, the library kept me safe, and kept me interested in art and literature. This has been no small factor in my decision to try and become a writer, I’m sure.
In fact, when I went to college, I chose to be an English major. In 2006, I was a freshman at Point Park University and one of the only students in the entire school who was simply an English major, and not English and education. I chose the major, of course, out of my desire to write, but by the time I entered my second semester of freshman year, I had a plan. I was going to get my bachelor’s in English, and then continue my education at the University of Pittsburgh, getting my master’s in library science. I wanted to be a librarian, and of course, I still wanted to write.
In the fall of 2008, I had to drop out of Point Park, mostly due to finances. I was receiving no aid from my family at no fault of their own; they were too poor to assist in my tuition and I found I could get almost no money from the state because unfortunately, neither of my parents were veterans, or dead. I was crushed. The decision itself was agonizing; I couldn’t believe it. I had been an honors student, though my grades admittedly weren’t perfect, but I had always been involved in extracurricular activities, I had scored in the top 2% on the SAT, and there was no money for me to go to school. The loans I had already taken out were going to crush me, and I simply could afford no more. I finally decided to resign myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be a librarian for a very long time.
Governor Rendell, I sit here in honest tears as I write this email. The library shaped who I was as a child, giving me an imagination, a desire to learn, and a dream which has been taken away from me for the time being due to a lack of funding. Please don’t take my library, my one sanctuary, away too, not for the same reason. Please allow other children to experience what I did, to let them learn and grow and be creative and maybe even find a dream.
“It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing-school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world.” -Owen Meredith
Thank you,
Melissa Beall
For more information, visit the Advocate for Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh , and please email Governer Rendell.
Dear Governor Rendell,
I only just now heard about your proposed plan to cut library funding by fifty percent. Please don’t do this.
The library has always been somewhat of a sacred place to me. In my small hometown of Monongahela, PA, we had an equally small library. However, due to the funds it was given, it always had up-to-date books and computers, a quiet reading room, and tons of activities and groups in which to participate. The building was kept in repair, and it was safe. I spent most of my free time there between book clubs and chess clubs and, of course, reading. It was the one activity my mother and I could afford to do together since we didn’t have much money. Not only was it a good bonding experience, the library kept me safe, and kept me interested in art and literature. This has been no small factor in my decision to try and become a writer, I’m sure.
In fact, when I went to college, I chose to be an English major. In 2006, I was a freshman at Point Park University and one of the only students in the entire school who was simply an English major, and not English and education. I chose the major, of course, out of my desire to write, but by the time I entered my second semester of freshman year, I had a plan. I was going to get my bachelor’s in English, and then continue my education at the University of Pittsburgh, getting my master’s in library science. I wanted to be a librarian, and of course, I still wanted to write.
In the fall of 2008, I had to drop out of Point Park, mostly due to finances. I was receiving no aid from my family at no fault of their own; they were too poor to assist in my tuition and I found I could get almost no money from the state because unfortunately, neither of my parents were veterans, or dead. I was crushed. The decision itself was agonizing; I couldn’t believe it. I had been an honors student, though my grades admittedly weren’t perfect, but I had always been involved in extracurricular activities, I had scored in the top 2% on the SAT, and there was no money for me to go to school. The loans I had already taken out were going to crush me, and I simply could afford no more. I finally decided to resign myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be a librarian for a very long time.
Governor Rendell, I sit here in honest tears as I write this email. The library shaped who I was as a child, giving me an imagination, a desire to learn, and a dream which has been taken away from me for the time being due to a lack of funding. Please don’t take my library, my one sanctuary, away too, not for the same reason. Please allow other children to experience what I did, to let them learn and grow and be creative and maybe even find a dream.
“It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing-school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world.” -Owen Meredith
Thank you,
Melissa Beall
For more information, visit the Advocate for Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh , and please email Governer Rendell.