Josiah Schmidt

07/16/2024

Dear community members:

Today I will be submitting my formal letter of resignation from the SCCCL Board of Trustees to Mayor Borgmeyer. In this letter, I explain that I am satisfied that the previous closures/layoffs plan is sufficiently out-of-consideration. Due to mounting personal and professional demands on my time and energy, as well as a lack of appetite on the part of my fellow board members for some of the deeper reforms that I feel we need, I am stepping aside to allow Mayor Borgmeyer to appoint a new trustee who can pursue needed changes more vigorously than I can. I hope that my board successor will also be an avid library patron and advocate. I trust that they will be someone who values freedom of information, openness and transparency, and the fostering of a workplace where all staff feel safe, heard, respected, part of a cohesive team, and integrated into the broader community that is St. Charles County. Thank you all for expressing your love of our libraries. I hope that I was able to move the needle in a positive direction in some small ways during my tenure on the board.

Your friend,
Josiah

06/20/2024

At last night's regular SCCCL board meeting, we voted on the following formal agenda items:

24-22: I made a motion, and voted with the rest of the board, in favor of granting a temporary construction easement to the City of St Charles. This is to ensure continuity and proper width of a sidewalk that runs along library property. The City will also be widening the Sibley Street entrance to the KL parking lot. This is a win-win solution that will benefit library patrons/staff, community members with disabilities, and the city of St Charles. This motion passed.

24-02: Along with the rest of the board, I voted in favor of my colleague Matthew Seeds's resolution to table indefinitely the May 17th closure/layoffs proposal, and to move forward with listening sessions on an extended timeline that will give the board adequate time to consider all options for improving the library's financial situation in the coming years. This motion passed.

24-33: I made a motion, and voted with a majority of the board, that, with the adoption of our FY25 budget, we--as board president Alvarez suggested--not immediately implement a simple across-the-board 7% raise for all library staff. This is so that we can look into taking a more nuanced approach to raises. There are certain employees who might benefit from a more-than-7% raise, and others who might already be receiving adequate compensation and not need a raise as high as 7% at this time. This will give the board time to look at all options. This motion passed.

24-34: I voted, with the rest of the board, in favor of making certain adjustments to the FY24 budget, including adding some revenues that had not previously been included, and moving some unused supplies funds to other needed areas like equipment service contracts, insurance, and rent/lease expenses. This motion passed.

24-35: I voted, with the rest of the board, in favor of appropriating sufficient capital project funds for FY25 to cover obligations we are already contracted for. This motion passed. I voted for this with the stated caveat that we as the board should increase the scrutiny we exercise over capital project expenses going forward into the future. This is a valid concern that I have heard loud and clear from the public in the past weeks. When opportunities for capital improvement projects present themselves in the future, I would love for the board and administration to seek more input from the community and from all staff (including everyone, even part-time and custodial staff), so we can develop more profound knowledge of what our staff and patrons need.

Lastly, we voted to enter into and then exit out of a closed session meeting, during which discussion took place but no formal actions were taken.

06/06/2024

What is the board meeting tonight? (June 6th)

* Tonight’s meeting is not a regular board meeting, but rather a budget work session
* The public can attend but there is not a public comment period
* We will be talking about next steps, and reviewing the FY25 budget
* No decisions are being made on closures or layoffs tonight
* Toward the end of the meeting, we will have a closed session (which will necessitate everyone except the board leaving the room); these are often held in order to deal with confidential matters relating to specific personnel or legal matters

Hope this makes things clearer and gives you all a better sense of what these different meetings are for. Thank you all for caring about our libraries!

06/04/2024

To all library staff who have emailed or reached out to me and to whom I have not yet responded or acknowledged. Thank you for your patience. I intend to read every word of every communication you send to me, and to acknowledge each of you as quickly as I can. Every communication that you send me is super valuable and adds more puzzle pieces to the overall picture of our library system that is coming into view. I also want to apologize as a board member for not getting down into the trenches and hearing all of you out sooner. I spent two years on the board just listening to monthly reports from the C Suite and “deferring to the experts,” and for that I am very sorry. Please continue to communicate with us in the board and know that you will continue to be heard and have your opinions respected, going forward. Your passion and caring for our library system makes me optimistic that we can all work together to create the kind of library system that we all need.

06/02/2024

"Managers talk about 'getting rid of deadwood,' but so often what happened is you hired live wood, and then you killed it. Killed it through refusing to listen to staff concerns, through refusing to take valid ideas from staff seriously, through making it so that staff don't understand what their job is and are too afraid to ask, through not giving staff the resources they need to do work they can be proud of, through management by arbitrary and unachievable objectives, through punishing staff for things that are out of their control. If you think you have a lot of staff in your organization who are not pulling their weight, then what you really have is a problem in your management. Only management can change the system."
-- Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Send a message to learn more

05/31/2024

The Deming philosophy of quality I keep harping on (in every organization I am involved in, not just picking on SCCCL) is not some kooky theory I’m pulling out of my own brain. It is a well-established best-practice philosophy of management that separates enduringly great companies and institutions from all the rest. Want to have staff who feel happy, heard, and respected, and processes that flow through a cohesive, optimized system, while constantly improving in efficiency and quality? Don’t just take my word for it:

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, on how the total quality philosophy of Dr. Deming & Dr. Juran laid the groundwork for his revolutionary success in managing peo...

05/30/2024

🗣️ 👂
Since making myself available online, over 80 current and former library staff have reached out to me to talk to me about what it’s like to work on the front lines, what’s working well, and where we need to improve. If you are SCCCL staff, I encourage you to contact me directly if you want a library board member who will listen to your thoughts or concerns directly. Your comments will be kept 100% anonymous. I have no say in internal policy or individual personnel matters, but your communications are helping me understand how our library system is functioning. As the board, we give administration direction on big-picture systemic matters. So please send me a message to help me better understand how we can help you. Thank you!

05/30/2024

Democracy works. When communities speak out, public institutions listen.

05/26/2024

To transform an organization and solve problems within a system, we need to have what Dr. Deming called “profound knowledge of the system.”

Dr. Deming’s Four Elements of Profound Knowledge (each need the other, can’t have one in isolation):
o 1. Appreciation for a system (understanding of how a system functions as a whole, how each department/employee fits into the larger system)
o 2. Theory of variation (understanding what it means for a system to be stable, what problems are caused by the system and what problems are caused by one-off events)
o 3. Theory of knowledge (understanding the difference between information and knowledge, between symptoms and causes)
o 4. Psychology (understanding the effects that management’s actions have on people, and on how those people will act as a result of management’s actions)

05/24/2024

Shabbat shalom to all those who love our St Charles library system and employees! In Judaism we have the concept of the “neshama”, the pure, ideal soul that exists within each of us, and which we can always return to, no matter how far we have strayed from the ideal self we wish we could be. I believe our library system also has a proverbial neshama—an ideal of how things should be and can be, and we need to maintain the optimism that our hard work can bring the reality back much closer to the ideal.

05/24/2024

In the interest of cultivating more in-depth public awareness of all that St Charles City-County Library is planning or working on, I intend to begin implementing the Shewhart Cycle framework with each of the library actions or activities that we discuss in our board meetings. The Shewhart Cycle consists of four stages: Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA).

For every library action or plan, I will be asking library leadership to articulate which stage we are in. I believe this will help us become more thoughtful and intentional in our activities:

- Planning - gathering data and coming up with a proposed course of action (if we are in the Planning stage, then I will be asking how will this action serve the community? how will this action improve quality? how will this action put the most basic needs of people first? how will this action improve cooperation within the organization? how will this action be communicated? will this action increase transparency, or will it increase unnecessary secrecy which fosters mistrust? will this action foster or eliminate fear among the staff? what kinds of unforeseen consequences might this action have?)

- Doing - actually execute the appropriately researched and considered action; try it out

- Studying - collect feedback, both statistics that show what numerical effects the action is having, as well as comments from staff showing what kinds of psychological effects this action is having (in the case of the former, I might request to see a control chart, so we can see if affected numbers are in statistical control or not)

- Acting - if the action is working as intended with no or minimal negative consequences, then make sure the action gets established firmly and does not fall to the wayside; if the action is not working as intended, then stop doing it and go back to the planning stage to try something else.

05/23/2024

“Perhaps people have a right to know something of the plans of the organization—will they have a job next week, will they have a job next year. How can somebody devote their knowledge to the organization, and do it with devotion, when they’re not sure if they’ll be there next week or next year? They’ll be spending their time and attention looking around for another job, if they have any sense. They’ll be trying to look out for themselves, since no one else is doing it. This is the problem management must face.”
-Dr. W. Edwards Deming