Library literacy and immigration

The Morrill Memorial Library Board of Trustees met last week for its monthly meeting with Library Literacy Department Coordinator Norma Logan for an update.

The program helps connect tutors with those looking to learn English, either on an individual basis or in small group settings. The program also helps students of most ages prepare for GED and citizenship tests.

“Just to give you an idea of the program right now, we have 60 active tutors,” she said. “Twelve are tutoring remotely, 11 have more than one student, and we have 96 total students. Now, mind you these numbers fluctuate monthly and, frankly, weekly. You could ask me next week it could be different, next month it could be different.”

Logan said they have had some problems in the last year. She said the publicized presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Norwood in the fall led to a challenging time for students and tutors, but she said the tutors – who are mostly volunteers – stepped up and did whatever they could to help.

“This has been a unique and challenging year for us,” she said. “I’ll bring you back to the fall when we had an immigration situation and ICE was in the neighborhood, and our students knew it. This caused some problems for them; whether they needed to be afraid or not.”

Logan said students did not come to lessons and stayed home to avoid contact with ICE.

“It was a rough time,” she said. “But the tutors stepped right up to the plate and offered to do things like meeting remotely online rather than in-person or delivering groceries to their house. Everybody stepped up to support them at that time.”

Logan said this issue continued and then combined with the economic situation that started with the Iran War earlier this year, which also affected student participation.

“Some students had been getting jobs, getting second jobs, and working more hours and that affected their schedules as well,” she said. “I was puzzled for a while. It’s great that they’re getting these jobs, but there was this flurry of activity of people getting these jobs. It wasn’t until I started talking to the tutors, who told me the places their student(s) work lost a lot of their employees, and so the ones still there have to work overtime and extra hours. That answered what was really going on: that a lot of places had lost their employees as an obvious byproduct of the immigration situation.”

Logan said the situation has now abated.

“It was a scary time,” she said. “We’re so grateful for the tutors to say, ‘What do you need?’”

Also recently, Logan said they were able to start reducing the program’s backlog – she said there was a very long waiting list of new students – after several tutor training programs had completed and there were more hands to lighten the load. She said after a cooling off period in the winter, most spots are filled.

“We always have a waiting list,” she said. “We always need tutors… we just ask our tutors to have a high school degree at least, and enthusiasm.”

Logan said there is a training course of about 18 hours before taking part. For more information, go to

Logan also gave an update of the three English as a second language (ESL) classes going on at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel, which was a program that sprang up three years ago at the behest of the hotel management.

“We have had a really successful collaboration with them,” she said. “The general manager came to us about three years ago and asked us if we could provide English instruction to her employees – and not for workplace success, but more to help them survive – because she is an immigrant as well and she knows the importance of English to survive in this country. She wanted to help them, and it’s been very successful. For three years, we’ve had three classes going there, and each class has about six students, running from October to May.”

For more information on the literacy program, go to https://gvimes.link/litprg

In other news, Board Member John Hall said he won’t be seeking reelection in the next term, and the Board gave him a going-away present to commemorate his service. Hall said he felt he contributed a good amount of time to the Board, but noted that, after doing a lot of research for his upcoming History of Norwood, there were many past members who did so much more.

“My total time here has been just over 10 years,” he said, noting that only a few modern members have been there that long. “But then you go back to the beginning and you start seeing people who were Trustees for 40 years or directors for 30 years. It was a different kind of field.”

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Hall said he had some experience with libraries before joining the Board, but he said getting into it was a completely different ballgame.

“So I said, ‘Ok, though it goes against my nature, I should sit back and listen more than I should talk,’” he said. “Then in the last few years of my tenure here, I started to see – and I think this has a lot to do with (Morrill Executive Director Clayton Cheever’s) arrival – I started to see a lot of rapid development and augment of capability, across the Board, across the staff, and it was becoming hard for egomaniacs like myself to find anything that they weren’t already doing well and they could use my input.”

He said that and his advancing years were the two reasons he was stepping down.

“I’m almost 80, I can feel every year of it lately,” he said. “I can feel my memories of things aren’t as clear as they were only a few years ago. So I figured I had a greater chance of going to a meeting and not contributing something useful, but of embarrassing myself and the library saying something everybody already knew and that sort of thing. So it seemed like the time was right, and the library was ready for a fresh set of people.”

Hall cautioned new members to not fall into the pit trap he did at his start on the Board.

“They very well may have arrived here thinking they already know very much of what the library needs, and ‘Boy are they going to be glad to see me,’” he said. “Welcome to disillusionment!”

Hall said he’s likely moving to Walpole, but that’s not too far away.

“So if you find that one rare issue on which I might actually be able to help, if only even by letting people bounce their ideas off me, I really hope you’ll let me know,” he said.