The Boone County Commission presented the Daniel Boone Regional Library with $250,000 of the county’s American Rescue Plan Act funds Monday. The funding will cover expenses related to the library’s Safety, Security and Social Resilience program over a two-year period.
Boone County Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick, who presented the funding, cited the educational opportunities and essential services the library provides.
“This money, we know, will help go towards expanding those opportunities and making sure it remains a safe place,” Kendrick said. “But also making sure that it’s a place where they can continue to provide additional resources.”
The Safety, Security and Social Resilience program consists of two recently created single-person departments that work in tandem to improve library safety and community interaction. Drew Ide, the safety and security manager hired August 2023, took over library security, including duties that were previously shared by other library staff. Community Resource Manager Tyler Davis joined in January to offer patrons help meeting social needs and accessing community services.
Together, Ide and Davis work to handle library disturbances and connect patrons in need with appropriate resources. They also offer security and social service training programs to the library staff, such as CPR training taught by Ide.
“It’s not this dichotomous role, where I’m doing one piece of this, and he’s doing another,” Davis said. “We’re very much in sync about how we’re approaching these behavioral issues and approaching it from a needs perspective rather than a behavior perspective.”
Angela Scott, the Daniel Boone Regional Library associate director, said the funding gives the program stability and the flexibility to define the role of the newly formed positions.
“We know that we needed these positions, and so (now) we have them in place,” Scott said. “And it’s nice to have that bump in funding and to have some more resources to be able to pour into it where we may not have known that we needed money for certain things.”
Davis said the funding also establishes a budget for the community resource team, allowing him to offer emergency supplies like food and water to patrons. Scott said the library might use the funding to expand the program, and that it plans to continue supporting the positions after the ARPA funding is used up.
“It may expand their departments — they’re single-people departments right now — and hopefully bring on more people so we can be more proactive about things,” Scott said.
