MORE FROM THE ATLANTIC WIRE:
Ted Cruz Walks Away from the Fight He Picked, Chuckling
Judge Rules It's Your God Given Right to Skip Commercials with a DVR
Pope Francis Is Pretty Rad
A library aide has been fired for successfully doing her most basic job — getting a kid to read more. And so, too, has the library's director, who started the reading controversy in the first place.
Lita Casey was dismissed on Monday after working for 28 years at the Hudson Falls Free Library in upstate New York. Her offense? Defending a nine-year-old child whose voracious reading appetite and abundant (and free!) library books makes him read too much. So much, in fact, that Weaver dominates the library's annual reading competition, having won his 5th straight reading title by absorbing 63 books in the 40 day competition.
That should be good news, right?
Not in the eyes of library director Marie Gandron, who said the soon-to-be fifth grader Tyler Weaver "hogs" the contest with his no-good-dirty-rotten-book-stealing reading habits. Gandron had hoped to change the structure of prizes awarded in the contest to encourage other kids to get involved in the reading contest, as “Other kids quit because they can’t keep up,"” Gandron said. Instead, Gandron wanted to award prizes for the reading "contest" by picking names out of a hat. Why that would actually encourage reading, we can't say. It's not as if those prizes were the main reason Weaver — the self-described "the king of the reading club" — was picking up those books in the first place. All little Weaver has won in his five year reign is an atlas, a T-shirt, a water bottle and certificates of achievement. That's nothing special.
Casey stood up for this injustice back in late August, calling the idea of changing the prizes "ridiculous." Well, she has since paid the price for standing up for her beliefs. "I could not believe it, and I still cannot believe it," she said after she heard she had been let go in a phone conversation. Gandron, too, has paid the same price herself, as she was also fired from her job last week after 41 years at the library.
With two of the library's six employees gone over a dumb controversy, it's hard to find much of a winner in this story. That is, except for our friend Weaver. If only these librarians had put down the books and watched some of The Wire, they would have known a good life lesson: You come at the (reading) king, you best not miss.
This post originally appeared on The Atlantic Wire.
