Why Sunday Story Hours Come to Whitney

Good morning. It is Friday. Today we’ll look at why the Whitney Museum of American Art will be holding “story times” with librarians from the New York Public Library starting Sunday. We’ll also learn about an effort to ban 24-hour shifts for home health care workers.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has monthly ‘story times’ for children from Sunday.

The Whitney’s holdings include the world’s largest collection of paintings by Edward Hopper and major works by Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others. That is art to be seen, not to be read.

A reading session is not what an art museum would normally schedule on a busy weekend day. So why are three story time sessions – at 11am, 1pm and 3pm – on Whitney’s calendar?

Officials at the Whitney saw a gap they could fill when Sunday story times disappeared at New York City libraries.

Sunday hours at libraries were doomed by budget cuts Mayor Eric Adams announced in November to offset the unexpected costs of managing the migrant crisis.

The city’s three public library systems — the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library and the Queens Public Library — immediately announced that libraries would no longer be open seven days a week. (In January, the mayor said libraries would not be subject to additional tightenings in the current budget year. But funding taken away in November was not restored, so libraries remain closed on Sundays. The library lists dozens of story times at branch libraries on other days.)

Whitney officials were already planning to lower admission prices on the second Sunday of each month. “We want to provide more opportunities to reach new people,” Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s director, told me in December.

Hosting Sunday story times fits that goal, and Brian Bannon, the director of branch libraries and education for the New York Public Library, said Whitney officials had approached the library about a partnership. But he said the library’s initial response was, “We would love to do this, but we can’t.” No one works on Sundays anymore.”

Then the Whitney offered to pay library staff who volunteered for story time at the museum. “This is not something we can offer in any other way,” Bannon said.

The Whitney said the funding came from the Art Bridges Foundation, which had given the museum a three-year grant to allow free admission on the second Sunday of each month. (The Whitney also began offering free Friday nights and free second Sundays in January, dropping its previous “pay what you wish” admission policy.)

As for the New York Public Library, Bannon said it faced a $58.3 million cut even though more people used libraries last year than in 2021 or 2022, according to figures in the mayor’s preliminary management report released in January was released. In fiscal year 2023, 1.03 million people attended programs at New York Public Library branches, nearly twice as many as in fiscal year 2022. The same branch libraries registered 407,167 people for new library cards in fiscal year 2023, up from 295,448 in the fiscal year 2022. .

He called the story times at the Whitney an experiment. After all, The Whitney is not a place where books can be checked out. But it is a place where people know books about art.

Cris Scorza, Whitney’s education chairman, recalled that when her daughter was two, “we used to read ‘Uncle Andy’s: A Fantastic Visit with Andy Warhol’ again and again.” The book by James Warhola, Warhol’s cousin, made an impression: “Every time we went to museums and saw a painting by Warhol, my daughter could recognize it from a mile away and say, ‘That’s my uncle.'”

Weather

Enjoy a mostly sunny day in the low 50s. Tonight will be mostly cloudy with temperatures dropping into the 40s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until March 24 (Purim).

The latest New York news

Home health care is one of the fastest growing industries in New York – and also one of the lowest paid, with often grueling hours. A bill introduced in the City Council on Thursday would ban 24-hour shifts.

My colleague Stefanos Chen writes that home care workers are allowed to work such shifts because of a long-standing interpretation of state law that requires them to be paid for only a maximum of 13 hours per day. Industry regulations are based on the idea that workers get three hours of food and eight hours of sleep, including five hours of uninterrupted rest.

Workers and union groups say this is rarely, if ever, the case due to the all-hours nature of the work. Opponents of the bill say banning 24-hour services is misleading and could drive up the cost of 24-hour care. A ban could also force home health agencies, which are supported by state and federal funding, to spend more per patient, potentially creating gaps in coverage for the neediest residents.

It is unclear how many home care workers work 24-hour shifts. But there were 17,780 New York City residents receiving Medicaid-funded, live-in care in 2019, according to 1199SEIU, a major union that represents health care workers. Replacing 24-hour shifts with two 12-hour shifts — effectively doubling the total number of paid hours — could cost an additional $645 million a year, according to an analysis by the New York City union.

Since the pandemic, no other sector has added more jobs to the city’s economy than home health care. It also remains one of the lowest-paying fields in the city, with an average salary of about $32,000, or nearly minimum wage, according to James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at New York University. New school.

Nearly 90 percent of home health care workers are women, according to Kezia Scales, the vice president of research and evaluation at PHI, a national research and advocacy organization for direct care workers. They are often immigrants and more than half are over 45 years old. Nearly 10 percent are 65 years or older.

Rendy Desamours, a spokesman for the City Council, said the effort to ban 24-hour services was misdirected because home health care is primarily funded through Medicaid, which is administered at the state level.

“It has been counterproductive and harmful to make people believe this can be solved at the city level,” he said in a statement. He added that Council President Adrienne Adams planned to introduce a bill urging the state Legislature to improve working conditions for home health care workers.

METROPOLITAN diary

Get in line

Dear Diary:

I dropped my left earbud on the subway platform in Times Square. It bounced twice and then fell onto the rails.

I didn’t want to buy a replacement if I didn’t have to, so I went to the guy in the coin booth upstairs.