Input is a library key

The story was one I’d told before.
Talking with Duane Sautbine at the Jay County Public Library’s reception for retiring library director Rosie Clamme, I was recalling back about 17 years ago when the library board was still in the planning stages for the current building.
That building is about 15 years old now but looks as beautiful and as functional today as it did when it was brand new.
I was remembering the board’s meetings with the architects as they tried to nail down various aspects of the design.
At more than a few of the meetings, students in the government class at Jay County High School were on hand, fulfilling a class assignment by watching local government in action.
But two students took particular interest, I remembered.
The two girls fulfilled their class assignment by attending a library board meeting with the architects. Then a month later, they came back to another meeting simply because they were interested. They didn’t have to be there. They chose to be there.
At that second session, architect Mike Montgomery was presenting the board with options for the building’s exterior. He’d prepared about three or four elevation drawings of different styles for the board to review.
The floor plan and windows and doors were the same, but the elevation drawing options were strikingly different.
The board looked them over carefully, but no clear favorite emerged.
Then, Bill Hinkle, who was president of the library board at the time, caught the students by surprise.
“Which one do you like?” he asked them.
They were stunned. But they shared their opinions.
One design was immediately nixed as cold and forbidding. The students felt it was uninviting, not a place they would want to visit.
Another was so-so.
A third was a little more formal than they would have wished, but they really liked it.
A second later, they were stunned again.
The board adopted their choice.
Their opinion — the opinion of two high school students who had originally attended the board meetings as a class assignment — was the deciding factor. The Jay County Public Library looks the way it does on the exterior today because of those students.
It was an amazing moment in civics.
Duane, who is now on the library board, liked the story enough that when Bill arrived for the reception he mentioned the anecdote to him.
“I’d forgotten all about that,” Bill said as I was heading back to the office to download some pictures. “You ought to write about that. It would make a good column.”
And it has.
Maybe not for the first time. I have a nagging suspicion that — just as I’ve told the story before in social settings — I may have written about it before as well.
But that’s okay. It’s still an amazing moment in civics.[[In-content Ad]]