Citing security concerns, a school board has voted to evict the only community library in Perryopolis from the high school it has occupied since 1960.
Over the vocal objections of residents, the Frazier School Board on Tuesday voted 9-0 to evict the Frazier Community Library from Frazier High School by June 30.
About 100 area residents packed the district’s middle school cafeteria for the school-board meeting. “You voted to evict the library,” one said flatly to the board after the vote. “Shame on you!” shouted another to board members.
The conflict in this Fayette County town of 1,700 is rooted in the library’s unusual status. By day, the two-level, 5,000-square-foot space functions as the high school’s library. After school hours and on Saturdays — for a total of 11 hours a week — it’s a privately funded, volunteer-run library with an exterior doorway and an interior door connecting it to the school.
In May 2022, the school district received the results of a state-police risk assessment that identified public access to the library as a potential threat to the safety of students and others using the building.
The specter of school shootings hung over Tuesday's meeting. As school-board member Jason Erdely put it, “The world’s changed dramatically in the last couple of years, I think we’re all aware of that.” He said the state-police assessment — which the board has declined requests to make public — “opened our eyes to where we’re very weak.”
But library board president Debi Tidholm said the library was not informed of the concerns until November. The district then demanded that the library begin using visitor sign-in sheets; that library staff fill out use-of-facilities forms for library events; and that it hire a security guard.
The library rejected sign-in sheets as an invasion of privacy, and the use-of-facilities forms as impractical for events like its monthly Saturday children’s story hours. And it called hiring a security guard too expensive on its annual budget of $20,000.
The library suggested installing a locking door between the library and school, but the district said that would violate the fire code, which requires two exits.
This year, the library retained an attorney in the dispute. On March 24, the library received a letter from Jeremy Davis, the school board’s lawyer, telling it to vacate by June 30.
As of this week, an online petition opposing the eviction had garnered nearly 1,400 signatures.
At Tuesday’s meeting, residents overwhelmingly opposed eviction. One questioned how the March 24 notice to vacate could be mailed two months before the school board voted to evict. (Davis, the attorney, replied the school district instructed him to send the letter then to give the library “as much time as possible to vacate.”)
Several speakers voiced skepticism that security was the school board’s real concern. They cited other ways they believed security to be loose at the high school, the suggestion being that the library had been unfairly targeted.
Other residents pleaded with the board to resume negotiations with the library. Melissa Patitucci, a business-owner and mother of three, said there must be a way to secure the school without evicting the library.
“The most important thing is how are our kids going to win? What are they going to gain from removing the community library?” she said.
“Kids need a library,” said Carol Ann Hamilla, speaking before the vote. She added that the next nearest libraries are about 15 miles away, in Uniontown or Rostraver Township. “Where am I going to go to get books?”
Others added that some in the community rely on the library for internet access.
Tidholm said that prior to the pandemic, the library typically welcomed about 2,000 visitors a year and was starting to approach those numbers again in 2022.
The library’s history, often referenced by speakers Tuesday, is uniquely intertwined with that of the high school. Both trace their names to Mary Fuller Frazier, a Perryopolis-born philanthropist who, upon her death in 1948, bequeathed $1.5 million to the borough. Tidholm said the library receives about $9,000 of its $20,000 budget from Frazier’s trust and fundraises the rest.
By all accounts, the library and school got along well for most of the library’s more than six decades of existence. (The school district said it still pays $4,000 a year toward the library’s operational costs, covers custodial costs, and assists with technology needs.)
The library’s roots in the community are palpable. Retired schoolteacher Nancy Schmeltz, who attended Tuesday’s meeting, ran story hours at the museum in the 1980s. She showed off an album of photos from those events, and said the kids who attended included current school-board president Stacey Erdely.
However, tensions emerged starting a few years ago, after Frazier High students petitioned the school to update the furniture and other accommodations in the library. The board and the library have since disagreed over renovations to the space and the weeding out of older books in the collection.
In April, the school announced it had completed the renovations, including soft seating and more power sources. “It’s more of a collaborative learning center now than a library,” district superintendent William Henderson told the Uniontown-based Herald-Standard. “It has more of a college feel for them.”
Library board president Tidholm said that while the library could theoretically relocate elsewhere in the community, moving would be too expensive.
She told WESA she believes that, under the terms of Mary Fuller Frazier’s bequest, the school district does not have the legal authority to evict the library. She said the board was talking with an attorney about whether to sue the school board to keep the library in place.
