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AFPLWATCH Articles Posted in July 2004

Management Meltdown
Posted July 30, 2004

It's no secret that over the past five years former library director Mary Kaye Hooker and the trustees who hired her deliberately

dismantled the library system's administrative structure
destroyed the library's cadre of trained technical support staff
generated a heartbreaking, disruptive exodus of dozens of competent library managers and seasoned subject specialists.

Less publicized is the increasingly serious predicament that the systematic strip-mining of administrative talent--combined with the inevitable results of the county's year-long hiring freeze on--has created for the ongoing management of AFPL's 34 different facilities:

Missing Links in Branch Services Management
Updated August 11, 2004

Facility Type	Library	Pre-Freeze Manager	*Current Manager*
Central	Central Library	Susan Earl Resigned October 2004	VACANT¹
Research	Auburn Avenue	Francine Henderson
Regional	Northeast	Claire Skerrett Resigned February 2004	Leona Bolch²
	Ocee		Gayle Holloman
	Roswell	Lu Conti
	Sandy Springs	Dorothy Parker
	South Fulton	Cheryl Miller-Holmes Resigned July 2004	VACANT³
	Southwest	Stephanie McIver	VACANT SOON⁴
Area	Alpharetta	Leona Bolch	VACANT⁵
	Buckhead	Katharine Suttell	Nancy Powers⁶
	East Point	Michael Hickman
	Northside	Emma Stanley-Tate Transferred to Central 2004	VACANT⁷
	Ponce	Bill Munro
Community	Adams Park	Celeste Gibson
	Adamsville/C.H.	Donnie Dixon
	Cleveland Avenue	Gloria Dennis
	College Park	Bonita McZorn
	Dogwood	Deborah Perry
	Fairburn	Janet Steingruber Died Fall 2002	VACANT⁸
	Kirkwood	Louise Nails
	Peachtree	Shannon Duffy
	Stewart-Lakewood	Clay Payne
	Washington Park	M.A. Bennett Resigned July 2004	VACANT
	West End	Rosie Meadows
Neighborhood	Bankhead Courts	Stephanie Morgan
	Bowen Homes	Marie Lee Resigned May 2004	VACANT
	Carver Homes	Beverly Hawes-Allen
	East Atlanta	Gayle Holloman Promoted to Ocee mgr. July 2004	VACANT⁹
	Georgia-Hill	Maureen Kelly
	Hapeville	Jean Hughes Transferred to Northeast Nov. 2003	Brenda Wright
	MLK, Jr.	Marquita Washington¹⁰
	Perry Homes	Dorothy Williams
	Thomasville Hgts.	Belinda Yellock
Bookmobile		Eugene Haston	VACANT¹¹

¹Child & Youth Services Administrator Doris Jackson is Acting Central Library Administrator.

²Northeast's Acting Manager is Leona Bolch, transferred from her position as manager at Alpharetta. On August 4th, recruitment of a new manager for Northeast was authorized; branch libraries received the announcement on August 9th.

³Recruitment for the South Fulton manager position was authorized July 29th and received at branch libraries on August 4th. However, due to the county's hiring freeze, only requests for lateral transfers (rather than promotions) will be considered, so whoever gets that job will create a vacancy at their present location.

⁴McIver plans to resign in December 2004.

⁵Alpharetta's Acting Manager is Mary Silver.

⁶Suttell retired August 10, 2004. Because Mary Kaye Hooker transferred two Central Library managers (Suttell and Powers) to the Buckhead branch in May 2000, Suttell's departure from Buckhead did not create another branch without a manager on staff.

⁷Northside's Acting Manager is the former manager of the Bookmobile, whose services have been temporarily suspended.

⁸Fairburn's "Interim Manager" is Michelle Carnes, formerly the former Deputy Director's administrative assistant and for a time the Interim Manager of AFPL's Collection Development Unit.

⁹Recruitment for the East Atlanta Branch manager position was authorized July 29th and received by branch libraries on August 4th.

¹⁰MLK is closed; Ms. Washington is currently working at the East Point Branch until the MLK branch re-opens.

¹¹The former board of trustees temporarily suspended the library's Bookmobile Services, and Haston is currently Northside's Acting Manager. There's been no recent discussion of the bookmobile's future.

Note: Two additional facility managers other than the ones shown above
are rumored to be retiring or resigning before Christmas.

What's Going On Here?

One-third of the library system's facilities are being operated without full-time managers. Several questions occur to us about this ever-worsening management crisis:

Is the county's hiring freeze causing other facilities operated by the county to go manager-less on the scale that the library is being forced to endure?

Do county officials really think that branch libraries can run themselves, or that rank-and-file employees can be indefinitely pressed into "temporary" duty as managers whenever a manager disappears?

Do county commissioners believe that library facilities somehow don't need qualified, full-time managers?

Do the county's Powers That Be fully understand that the gaps in management caused by the hiring freeze represent very real efficiency problems and potential legal vulnerabilities as well as daily morale drains on county employees and a lower level of service for library customers?

Are county officials consciously or unconsciously trying to "punish" the library system for all the money in legal fees and penalties the library system's former director and board has cost the county government the past few years? (To many of the library's exhausted and demoralized rank-and-file--who were, lest we forget, the first victims of Hooker's and the board's slash-and-burn approach to running the library--sometimes it certainly feels like the library is now being re-victimized by county administrators. Why do library employees keep seeing so many recruiting notices for vacancies in other county departments and never any such notices for library vacancies?)

Does everyone understand that a prolonged, unmitigated hiring freeze creates a vicious circle of ever-increasing management depletion? Not only are front-line employees who already have full-time non-management tasks abruptly pressed into unpaid service as "temporary managers," but more and more managers--especially at the busiest facilities--are concluding that their jobs are basically un-doable, due to the lack of adequate numbers of on-site staff and nonexistent off-site technical support to carry out the library's mission. These discouraged managers then decide to resign or retire earlier than they'd planned, and further management vacancies are created.

It's difficult to imagine how the library is ever going to reverse its downward spiral without some immediate, strategic relief to deal with the decimation of the library's managers. Of course, even if county officials were to see the wisdom of green-lighting the immediate filing of every vacant library management position, there's still the huge problem of the 50+ (60+?) frozen vacancies in the rank-and-file portion of the library system's workforce. Still, addressing the department's management voids would be a wise investment of county resources.

Posted July 27, 2004

Intention: A
Execution: C

That’s the rating we give the following memo, which library staff received last week:

A WORKPLACE REMEMBERING AND MOVING FORWARD
July 29, 2004
Dear Library Staff,

Please join us on Thursday July 29, 2004, as we remember the lives and contributions of deceased Library System employees, Gladys Dennard and John Eggleston.

On that day, we will have an interactive forum where we can discuss memorable recollections about these colleagues and the impact of their loss on the organization.

This session will be facilitated by the National Coalition Building Institute Atlanta and will be funded by the Library Foundation. It will be an opportunity to work together to collectively develop a culture in the Library System that we want to create.

There will be two sessions held in the 4th Floor Multi-Purpose meeting room at the Central Library. The first session will take place at 9:00 a.m., followed by a 2:00 p.m. session of which you may attend either session.

Attendance is voluntary. We welcome your participation and hope to see you there.

Sincerely,

Anne T. Haimes
Interim Director of Libraries
Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System
Telephone: (404) 730-1972

Some background for our non-AFPL readers:

Gladys Dennard was the manager of the library’s South Fulton branch. She was shot and killed at the branch two years ago by John Eggleston, a staff member with a long history of disciplinary problems at the branch. Eggleston then killed himself, and the horrible scene was found by another employee arriving for work.

The library’s response at the time was exactly what you would expect of the Hooker regime. Lip service was paid to the conventions - Shock! Horror! Hooker’s description of the tragedy to other library directors was typically self-centered: it was "a director’s worst nightmare"! There followed an also-typical search for a scapegoat and a concerted brushing-under-the-rug of the relevant facts.

It’s difficult to describe the level of staff anger and disillusionment. Many staff were aware of the ongoing struggle between Gladys and Eggleston, and perceived the tragedy as a direct result of the library administration's failure to help Gladys. Being forced to listen to Ms. Hooker and Ms. Garnes (then the Deputy Director) mouthing pious clichés, when so many held these two individuals responsible for Gladys' death, was intolerable. Perhaps because these two dimly sensed how poorly their performances were playing to the troops, they soon dropped the subject altogether. Several news media did publish stories about the murder, including documentation of the administrative negligence that led up to it, but after Valerie Jackson, Dennard’s immediate supervisor, was demoted in punishment for what had happened, Gladys’ murder was banished from discussion at the library and library administrators never referred to it again. There was no library memorial service for our murdered colleague, and, in fact, when the branch where Gladys had worked held its own little memorial on the one-year anniversary of the killings, The Powers That Be were not happy.

Ms. Haimes' decision to have the library at last collectively address what happened is admirable, and we applaud her for that.

What we don't understand or applaud is her decision to include John Eggleston in the memorial, as if he were a victim of this tragedy rather than the perpetrator responsible for a brutal murder that left two girls without a parent.

We also wonder - given the emphasis in Haimes' announcement about “moving forward” - how welcome negative comments and honesty will really be at this forum. For many staff members, any discussion of what happened would inevitably include the issue of who was responsible for it, and how the tragedy might have been prevented. That means criticism of how the situation leading up to the killing was handled. Will our new administration really be open to that?

Sometimes there can be no “closure” (hated word!). We can move forward, but we’re moving forward without Gladys, who died horribly in her office, an end she had apparently feared would come. Decisions were made or not made that caused that to happen.

After Gladys' violent death, the outside agency that administers Fulton County’s Employee Assistance Program told library staff that there were at least a couple of other situations within the library that they feared could go the same way. Yet we all know that not a whole lot has changed in the way that library administrators handle employee discipline problems. Managers are still squeezed between administration’s demand that they discipline problem employees, and the problem employees themselves. Administration demands from managers a level of accountability that it doesn’t demand of itself. That is something a lot of people want to say, and yet are afraid to, because they have seen in the past what happens to those who speak up.

We hope that the ground rules for this meeting will include an assurance that people may speak their minds without fear of repercussions of any sort. Because if Gladys’ awful and senseless death is to have any meaning, it should be that such a situation never happens again. And the best way to ensure that, is to allow honest criticism of what happened on that terrible day two years ago.

Don’t Defy the Spirit of the Library Reform Law!
Posted July 7, 2004; updated July 12, July 14, July 15, and August 3, 2004

Drum roll, please…....Ladies and Gentlemen! Introducing…the New Board…a/k/a the Old Board!!!!

Yep, there’s bad news. According to recent postings of the agenda and minutes of the Fulton County commissioners’ meetings, the commissioners are busy reappointing previous library board members to the newly “reformed” library board:

Nancy Boxhill has reappointed Jay Suber.
Commission Chair Karen Handel has reappointed Stephanie Moody.
Commissioner Emma Darnell has reappointed Zeda Stanley-Sartor.

Reappointing previous board members was not the intent of the legislation passed and signed this spring. The spirit of that legislation was REFORM. That means a new broom sweeping clean and starting over, not bringing the same old cast of characters back on stage wearing new costumes.

What were they thinking - hey, the public's attention is finally off the library system, we can now go back to business-as-usual? Do librarians need to stage a special storytime for the commission, where we read to them the tale of how the leopard couldn't change his spots?

These reappointments are an insult to library staff, library patrons, and Fulton County taxpayers.

Previous board members are the people who earlier this year rated former library director Mary Kaye Hooker as “outstanding” when they gave her their so-called performance evaluation. This travesty was enacted after a federal jury found Hooker guilty of race discrimination, after two lawsuits cost the county's taxpayers $18,250,000, and barely a month before Hooker was finally fired.
It's the previous board that repeatedly demonstrated it didn't know that a library board’s role is to set policy and raise funds, not to micromanage.

Are we supposed to believe that the members of the previous board were sent to re-education camps last month and have re-emerged as new people? Or have they perhaps been washed in the Blood of the Lamb, and are now a new creation?

No, these reappointments constitute disturbing evidence that the library system is in jeopardy of another extended episode of the Same Old Same Old. Are the county commissioners going to mrely pay lip service to reform while reverting to doing business as before? To run on to their next crisis after only pretending they've solved this one?

Don't the commissioners realize that reappointing members of the old library board is dooming Fulton County’s library system to permanent 5th-rate status? (Oh well, it’s only a library. It’s only information. It’s only education. Perhaps Fulton County citizens simply don't deserve first-rate libraries?)

The commissioners responsible for these reappointments should be ashamed. We certainly hope their colleagues will not follow suit.

July 12th Updates:

The Board of Commissioners discussed the new library board at its July 7th meeting. The notes to that meeting state only that the discussion was conducted--nothing about the content of the discussion.

Commissioner Edwards has appointed Willie M. Bolden as his representative to the new board. Although Bolden did not serve on the previous board, several veteran library employees remember that many years ago Bolden managed the library system's personnel office.

July 14th Update: Of the half-dozen or so AFPLWATCH readers who have contacted the webmaster so far with opinions about the new board members, all but one of them were alarmed to hear that Bolden has been appointed. Their stories about their personal interactions with Bolden back when he worked at the library were, to put it mildly, hair-raising. In fact, their tales make the notoriously obnoxious and incompetent William McClure sound positively benign by comparison. Are the county commissioners simply unacquainted with any people of quality in this great big county of ours?

July 15th Update: According to an announcement on the Fulton County government web site, "Commission Chair Karen Handel will hold an organizational meeting of the new Library Board of Trustees on Wednesday, July 28, 2004, at 4 p.m.” in the 6th floor board room of AFPL’s Central Library.

August 3rd Update: According to the agenda for the county commision's August 4th meeting, the final two vacancies on the library's new board have been filled:

Commissioner Riley has appointed John Thomas.

Commissioner Lowe has appointed Barbara Frolik.

The Atlanta City Council's representatives will be Jim Maddox and Natalyn Archibong.

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