Photo by Eric Taunton.
Spring Park is home to one of Homewood’s “little free libraries.”
When schools closed because of the pandemic, Alli Phelps was desperate to get as many books into the hands of her students as possible.
The Shades Cahaba Elementary School English teacher raced to school one day during quarantine and cleared her classroom of all books to give to her students and their families, she said.
“Our schools shut down and all of a sudden, the libraries were closed as well,” Phelps said. “Up until that point, I had been meeting my students and their families weekly after school at the Homewood Public Library. We were just rocking and rolling like we do during the year, with lots of books and going back and forth from our school and the library. When everything stopped, everything really stopped for them.”
After she ran out of books to give, her next door neighbor, Lori Song, came up with an idea to get more books for her students, she said.
Song told her she saw old plastic media stands being thrown away that belonged to Weld, a Birmingham news publication, before they went out of business.
“She said, ‘Why don’t we take one of those and get our kids to paint it and maybe we could buy some books, put them in there and put them in Rosedale,” Phelps said.
They decided to create makeshift Little Free Libraries and established them in two communities in Rosedale, Spring Park and near the Lee Community Center, which is where the majority of her students live, Phelps said.
She reached out to parents in the community to see if they wanted to help, Phelps said.
Parents such as Alexa McElroy helped Phelps maintain the little libraries, she said.
Two years later, Phelps and other members of the community unveiled a new little library at the Lee Community Center on Sept. 8, with another coming to Spring Park later this year.
The students she teaches tend to have very few books in the home, Phelps said, leaving them to rely heavily on the school and local libraries.
The little libraries didn’t go as well as she hoped, she said.
Phelps said they were very hard to maintain, and both had plexiglass fall off the media stands, leakage, insects and other complications.
“I kept trying to take care of them and it was like rolling a stone uphill,” Phelps said.
But after a while, Phelps said she started getting pictures from her students’ parents of them holding one of the books in front of the little libraries.
After her students came back to school, they would ask Phelps when more books would be put in the little libraries, she said.
“They had started to get used to it,” Phelps said. “During COVID, they got used to having the books right there, so I would have kids walk over to the Little Free Library and, if there weren’t new books in there, they would be like ‘Ms. Phelps, I need something to read.’ Anytime a kid tells me they want to read a book, I want a book in their hand and I want to talk to them about it.”
Phelps and Song got in touch with local carpenter Gary Sasnett to build the libraries and local children’s book illustrator Michelle Hazelwood Hyde to paint them, she said.
“These kids and these families make me want to work super hard for them and create a place of equity, accessibility and to foster a love of reading,” Phelps said.
