Parks and Recreation Committee - Regular Meeting

Alright. We'll call this up some public library board meeting Tuesday, 12/16/2025 to order. We'll start with the pledge of meeting, please. I pledge

allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Roll call of membership. Martin Smith is excused. We've got Bastia on Zoom, everyone else is here. So we'll move to minutes from a previous meeting. Do I have a motion to approve twenty five dash one five zero three, the November?

A 109 moved to approve. Nancy Scheirman, second.

All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? K. That passes. Next up is public participation. And do we have anyone here to speak other than we're welcoming a new board member this evening, so Kevin Engelberg. And do you I'm sort of stepping in here. Do you wanna just introduce yourself a little bit to us?

Sure. Good evening, everyone. I'm Kevin Engelberg. Give you a little bit of my background. Development and land services director for Outagena County. Currently, I've been there for the past couple of years. Had a few different professional roles. I worked for the East Central Regional Planning Commission before the county. And prior to that, probably what's most interesting to you guys is I worked as a planner for Madison Public Library for two years before my wife and I moved here, which is home for me. I'm from Menasha.

I grew up in the area. Moved to the city last year, and I told the mayor that I'd like to get on the library board, and so he signed me up for the housing authority board. And I said, okay. But maybe if there's a position on the library board at some point. So here I am.

Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Really glad to have you guys. So we will move to action items then. And do I have a motion to add the following items to a consent agenda, 25 dash one five zero four, 25 dash one five zero five, 25 dash one five zero seven, 25 dash one five eleven. So moved. Kellen? Second. Margaret Mann? Any discussion about adding those to a consent agenda? First. All those in favor of putting those on a consent agenda? I.

Any opposed? So that passes, and now we can discuss the items on the consent agenda. So we have to move to approve the consent agenda then first. Okay. I'm getting the order a little wrong here. So move to approve that consent agenda. Do have motion to approve?

Margaret Mann moves to approve.

Second. Second. Brian Berger. Second. Now we can discuss the items on the consent agenda. So the discussion of the bill register. Discussion of the budget amendments. Discussion of the 2026 library budget.

I have a question because I'm not sure if I was looking at it right. So you can clarify that. Now on page 33 Mhmm. Where it shows a full life budget. And so I'm looking at year to actual for 2025. That seems low. It is. So

these these year to date actuals for the for the budget, they're taken from earlier in the year, and they don't necessarily get updated. So you you know that we start working on the budget way earlier. Well, that's probably from, like, about halfway through the year. That's my kind of thought. And so by the time this was approved at the council level back in November, you can see the last updated date on that was 09/22. But even that use of date 2025 number was probably Probably from from earlier. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you.

Other discussion of the 2026 library budget. Discussion of the requested approval to solicit proposals for the strategic planning process. K. All those in favor of approving the consent agenda then, say aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed, nay. Okay. The consent agenda passes, and we move on to information items starting with an administrative report on the hiring process.

I'm gonna share it a little bit with Colleen today, so I'll go first. We have an open page position. That would be a subposition for less than half time. That one closes December 28. And then we did our interviews to replace our Adriana, the community partnership supervisor yesterday. So we are moving forward with the candidate and hope to have more news. For the Maureen piece. Yeah.

Yeah. So we are. So one little secret is that you always gotta surprise Maureen. Otherwise, she's gonna overstress about what you're gonna say.

It's awesome that we retire in the space.

Yeah. I'm a great save. So as you were informed, Maureen has announced her retirement. She's going to be retiring on January 2. So this is going to be her last board meeting, and she is doing a great job training Missy on all of the joys of the mechanics of the board meeting minutes and all of that. But just wanted to spend a brief minute just recognizing Maureen. She started working for the city of Appleton in 2001. It's your first role at PD or DPW. It was utility. Utility. Waste

of other.

Yeah. And then worked for p police department

for

a little bit. And then the libraries all opened up, and Maureen got that role in 2004. And so she has been doing the administrative work, including board meetings, including the the really exciting work of meeting room bookings, which has changed a lot. And Maureen has probably more meeting room booking fans than you could possibly know. And I hope this is okay, Maureen.

But last week when we were talking about how wonderful her work is, literally, somebody showed up with a box of cookies to thank Maureen for her work in booking their meeting room the week before. So it was one of those, like, full circle moments. She regularly gets thank you cards and notes of appreciation from people. She's also really the secret ingredient to pretty much all of the library's parties. So we are definitely gonna miss Maureen, and we wish her very well in her retirement.

We'll have a little celebration on her last day, and and so give you a little bit more information about that when when I have

that finalized. So so yeah. But in

the meantime, congratulations, Maureen, and thank you.

My pleasure to get to know all of you and work with you and really one of the highlights of my career at the library is serving you, all of you on the library board. Bless you. Yep. We're gonna miss you.

And the process, we have a process going on for role, and so we will be doing interviews likely next week for that.

Excellent. Thank you. I think we can move to the president's report now. And because I didn't check my email, I did not prepare for this at all. So and I've got the trustee calendar for 2026, which is on the last two pages, thirty six and thirty seven of the report, which is rather than a list of dates, mostly just a reminder of the overall schedule, the months that we generally do things, the kinds of meetings and activities that are recurring.

For Kevin and other new board members, this is really useful just to sketch out the year. I don't know if there were any comments or questions, discussion about the the general calendar. I can't remember when we get the dates for 2026. We set those already? The board meeting? The board meeting date?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Somewhere. I just resend those to email. Kevin, I don't know if you got them.

That's most of them.

I have them. We do have them? Okay.

But if anybody would like them, I'm happy to just

K. Great. With that, we can move to reports. Staff updates, I'm starting children's programming.

I'm head of children services, and I'm gonna update you on two programs today. I have some fun pictures to pass around. So I had updated you guys on Bear Bingo a little bit ago. So Bear Bingo is a reading program that we run-in November, and the goal for that program include helping participants staying excited about reading even when summer library program is over and also challenging them to read a little more broadly. So we we try and push them to read in genres and areas that maybe they're not naturally gravitating towards.

So this year, we had 765 total participants in Bare Bingo 375 of those for the early childhood and 390 from five to 12. And you'll see on there the winners of the grand prizes, which are those giant bears. Mhmm. And so the little girl, I think, is willing to share it with her brother at least for the picture purposes. You'll see there. So that was a lot of fun. Everybody had a good time, and there's a prize wheel that they're able to spin. So the kiddos love it, and staff enjoy it. They're also happy when it goes to the backroom. It's good.

And then another program, we just started up kinda. We're trying it out in December, and we will run it through next year, and that's Pokemon Club. And this one is actually a partnership with the American Association of School Librarians. It's partnering with the Association of Library Services to Children, and they're all partnering together with the Pokemon Company to do, like, an official Pokemon club, which means that we got some official Pokemon cards and things. So the goal is not competition, but encouraging kind of that camaraderie and playing together.

Nobody has to have stuff at home to bring with them. They can come, and I have some cards. They can play the game. They can just kind of talk to other fans about what they're interested in. So the idea is more kind of building camaraderie and teamwork and providing a safe space for something that kids are really passionate about and everybody in their world does not always want to hear. Then they can come and talk to other fans. So we're starting that one up, and so far,

it's been fun.

I may, from my kids, have a box of Pokemon cards sitting somewhere in the basement.

It with Oh, yeah. First. Yeah. Yeah. Can you about the Yeah. Pokemon cards. Oh. Which one? They are. But, yes, they were old.

Hopefully.

But I have no very little problems. Thanks,

Anne. Any questions for Anne? Okay. We'll move to community partnerships. And, Katie, thank you for stepping stepping in and filling filling in.

Hello, everyone. I'm Katie Silp. I am the local history librarian. I'm also serving as one of the interim supervisors for community partnerships along with Peter Katarba, who's one of our adult services and engagement librarians. So excited to pry provide a little update on what we're up to.

First, teen services, they're doing amazing. They have this awesome Launchpad program coming up next month on January 31, where we're encouraging young entrepreneurs to present an idea to us. And there are three cash prizes for, the different, you know, bronze, silver, gold winners. So we just extended the applications by one week. So teens have up until December 29 to submit their application and hopefully get chosen.

So this is also, we also opened it further. So, originally, it was just going to be just for Appleton Schools, but now it's sixth through twelfth graders residing in the Fox Cities. And we've got a spot on our website where you can learn more about those specific communities that we consider Fox Cities. Also, in their teen advisory program, they created some wonderful bookmarks for our children services to give out to kids and as well as bookmarks that are going in our walking books, materials that are for the homebound people. So just providing a little bit more joy for those people.

We've got our library assistant in technology and innovation, Maddie Brown, who has been working on two programs. So later this month, on December 23, she's gonna do Twine and Dine. So this is, teens are gonna build their own choose their adventure, story, and they're gonna be using open source storytelling tool that's called Twine. So it's not Twine like stuff that you, like, you know, use to make something. It's this cool new storytelling tool.

Then on December 30, she's gonna do AI bingo. So teens are gonna learn all about deep AI and try some creative different prompts before they use it to play bingo. So they'll use AI to generate different images to then fill out the squares on their bingo card. She's also working on some programs for teens and adults in the new year, so more to come on that. And then, of course, because I'm the local history librarian, I'm gonna tell you what I'm

up to.

So our find your ancestors series, which is one of our popular genealogy series wrapped up for the year this past Saturday, where we talked about developing a genealogy research plan and using that to make sure you're doing thorough research. And then our next session is going to be Saturday, January 10 at 2PM, all about Polish genealogy. And then genealogy jump start is our other genealogy series that I teach. So I just did our last session of the year this afternoon, all about researching religious records. And then our next session is going to be Saturday or Tuesday, January 27 at 2PM, all about finding your family in online repositories.

So teaching all about the different ways that you can find your family without even leaving your house. And then quickly, I just wanted to promote. This is my visual. This is a wonderful vinyl mandala. So right now, starting at 06:00, we have a concert in Craft with our flip side artist, 7,000 apart.

It's gonna start at 06:00 on the learning stairs and in the comments. So you'll be able to listen to a ninety minute acoustic set from this amazing Swedish American indie folk rock band. And then while you listen to the concert, you can create your own final mandala. So if you think this looks cool and you wanna make your own, feel free to stop at the commons and on the learning centers.

That's all I have.

Excellent. Thanks so much, Katie, and thanks thanks to you and Peter for.

Day two. So far, so good. Well,

it was a short agenda, and I've been leaving for the night, but I think that's everything. So we have a motion to adjourn.

Van Donald. So moved. Second. Second. Nancy Schrier.

All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Alright. Thanks so much, everyone. Happy holidays. We are adjourned.

It's quite exciting. So

you just find here,

and you should