Drayton Valley (Yellowhead Regional Library)

From Drayton Valley Municipal Libraries:

As a very brief overview… Verna has an Education degree from UofA and was teaching up until a couple years ago, so this virtual homework help initiative grew from her Drop-In Homework help that she started before the pandemic hit. It runs on a Zoom platform and is, for the most part, a one-on-one program. I had heard on the news the other day that students, generally, are not keeping up their studies (even with their on-line classes run by their own schools) since schools closed, so I would be interested to know how many people have been taking advantage of Verna’s program.

But she has been doing far more than just on-line homework help. I’ve attached our April newsletter as well as two articles that appeared in last Thursday’s local newspaper as these PR pieces speak volumes about the library’s eServices, Virtual Programs and eResources during the closure of physical spaces and how we’ve shown ourselves to be nimble at adapting to the change in environment.

And then there’s the fact that our Board voted last Thursday to keep ALL staff (except casual Student Pages) on payroll at their regular wage and hours until at least April 23 so that there is no interruption of income or benefits… 50% of the staff remain working in the Library on collection clean-up projects while the other 50% are working from home on continuing education and/ or remote ILS work via Polaris Leap. I’m proud of this as it was not an easy or straight-forward sell to the Board given that the Federal and Provincial governments seem to change the landscape every day with a subsidy program announced one day and then the next day you find out that you don’t qualify and the following day you find out that maybe you do or maybe you don’t qualify. It’s like trying to operate in a wind tunnel and the email traffic on the APLAC listserv adds to the noise and makes it even more confusing. But that’s just me griping.