About the Board of Trustees

As an Ossining resident, taxpayer, and patron who fondly remembers her visits with her daughter and her bi-lingual aging parent to the Ossining Public Library over the years, I am proud of the work which has been accomplished during this recent term (2019-2022) by our Board of Trustees. Despite the challenges which resulted from the latest historic pandemic and its evolving limits, restrictions, and advisories, we were productive in working responsively and strategically on multiple fronts.

It has been an honor to support our Library Director, Karen LaRocca-Fels, who is the right leader at an especially critical period. She and the OPL staff rose to the occasion time and again in designing remote working arrangements, safer in-person workplace protocols while developing new delivery systems for requests from our collection and for our programs. The Board regularly met to revise and create policies which ensured that OPL’s work, and services, would continue to be conducted in a safe, responsible manner and which reflected best practices and new trends in Library Services. Lockdown gave us the opportunity to aggressively focus on our facility to update our HVAC system, monitor our Air Flow in accordance with CDC requirements, reassign workspaces, assess our building’s needs, replacing old carpeting, aged furniture, outdated computers, updating our technology as well as checking on our exterior property.

We remain on task and committed to live up to our responsibility to take care of, and best ensure, a sustainable future for this most important and precious institution in our town. We have spent the last year brainstorming and listening to all levels of OPL staff and members of our community to define our mission, focusing on ALL our patrons to offer the greater Ossining community a center for lifelong learning!

The work we do on the Board of Trustees is truly a privilege to Protect, Preserve and Plan for OPL’s future!