It was distressing to read John Santa’s recent front page article about the problematic labor negotiations between the Great Neck Library and their staff.
As a longtime patron of the library, I have always found our staff to be outstanding. They are dedicated, hard working, professional, friendly, and somehow manage to satisfy people who can be very exacting. Several recent visits to other local libraries only reinforced my admiration for this staff.
As a former private school administrator, I quickly realized that my most important job was to keep the staff happy. They needed to be relaxed, confident, and able to concentrate on teaching and guiding the children. For without them, there would be no school. And without our staff, there would be no library.
It is really upsetting to realize that the board has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars – perhaps more — seemingly without restraint, and now appears to want to balance things by giving the staff as little as possible.
It is also embarrassing that the Port Washington Library completed a noteworthy renovation, and the Manhasset and Elmont libraries built brand new cost-effective facilities, while Great Neck seems unable to figure out what its patrons want, even after so many years. Something is seriously wrong here and priorities seem skewed.
The staff is the heart and soul of our library; they deserve respect, recognition, and compensation; and they are often working under difficult circumstances, especially recently with some odd and unexplained changes at Main that appear to make their jobs even more difficult.
I hope that the library will find a way to properly reward our excellent staff, since they are obviously deserving and should not have to go to the press in order to try to resolve this significant issue.
Diane Coffield
Great Neck
