Matt Driscoll: The big impact of one little free library

Without knowing the back story, it doesn’t seem like much: an orange and blue box with a swinging door and a shingled roof, perched on a simple white wooden post.

It’s a little free library — a DIY community book exchange where people can take and leave reading materials as they please. You’ve probably seen one much like it in someone’s front yard.

But this little free library is different.

For the last four months, 10 students at Communication, Language and Speech Services Inc., a small clinic inconspicuously tucked inside the large, barn-like building at the end of Dock Street near Thea’s Park, worked toward a moment this week that I was graciously invited to – when the little free library they built would be unveiled to the world.

They sawed. They hammered. They nailed. They collected books from the community and nearby businesses.

And on Thursday afternoon, when the curtain came down and their little free library was filled for the first time, they smiled.

They smiled wide. And so did their families.

Paula Herrington is the clinic director at CLASS Inc., which serves clients — primarily children — with “complex communication needs,” she says. Many have autism, and many rely on sophisticated voice output devices or augmentative communication technology — like iPads running apps filled with commonly used words — to share even the most basic of sentiments. It’s the kind of communication most of us take for granted.

“Our goal here is to make communication functional,” Herrington tells me of the clinic she started in 1998 on Vashon Island. She moved operations to Tacoma four years ago, after a stop in Federal Way, and these days serves some 125 clients. (The clinic’s dog, Bijou, was the subject of a 2014 column by Larry LaRue.)

“I’ve always enjoyed working with the people that have the greatest challenges. … These are the people we have a lot of success with, because we really like them,” she says of her students, who, based on what I saw Thursday, certainly seem to reciprocate that feeling.

While much of the speech therapy that happens at CLASS Inc. takes places in individual sessions, the 10-student group class responsible for Tacoma’s newest little free library uses a group setting to help foster social skills and peer engagement.

Kelley Nesbitt’s autistic son Ryan is 23. Once a week, they make the long drive from Silverdale to Tacoma for what Herrington and the team of specialists she’s enlisted have to offer. “When Ryan got out of school, it was a matter of trying to find out what his life was going to look like. Because post-high school is so different than school,” Nesbitt says. “This is just part of his life plan right now.”

To hear her tell it, the clinic’s emphasis on unscripted group activities – like the little free library project – is working wonders.

“The cool thing is that over the course of the time that these guys have been together, they’ve truly become friends,” Nesbitt says. “Ryan has grown more here than in most other places he’s been, and I think it’s because the social interaction is facilitated naturally. He has friends. He’s 23, and that’s never happened for him before.

“So that, by itself, is worth it all.”

Thursday afternoon the spoils of the group’s work were on full display — evident not just in the little free library that now resides just outside CLASS Inc.’s offices, or in the friendships forged between the students and their families, but also in the pride on the student’s faces as they shared their work with the community for the first time.

Sam Hinzmann is 15, autistic, and he’s been coming to CLASS Inc. for 12 years. With the aid of an iPad with an app that speaks for him, he tells me he liked the hammering the best.

“The building process was amazing. They all hammered and sawed and helped each other. He wanted to come to group every week,” Sam’s mom, Kerin, tells me. She’s beaming.

“It was great. Really great.”

At a small after-party Thursday, Dianna Finlay, a speech pathologist at CLASS Inc. who works with the group, puts the moment into perspective. She says spending time with this group is “the highlight of my week.”

“It was amazing. I’m so proud of them,” she says of the little free library and the effort that went into it. “Everything about the execution of our unveiling was perfect.

“But it’s more so the culmination of how hard they’ve worked for it that’s just really inspiring.”

“This has been the ultimate,” Kelley Nesbitt says of the little free library project. “It’s going to be hard to top this one.

“I’m sure they’ll come up with something, though.”

I can’t wait to see what they do next.

This story was originally published February 20, 2016 at 1:07 AM with the headline "Matt Driscoll: The big impact of one little free library."