It’s probably best to get this out of the way right up front: the Internet handle for Lesley Williams, Evanston Public Library’s beleaguered director of adult services, is “Cranky Librarian.”
During the next week, as the city deliberated, the library board of trustees issued a statement in support of its director, Karen Danczak Lyons. The board announced that it had renewed Danczak Lyons’s annual employment contract, and complained that “unsubstantiated social media” protests (on Williams’s behalf) “undermine our strategic plan; demoralize our wonderful and hard-working staff; and threaten to burn the bridges EPL has sought to build throughout our city.”
On Thursday, she was given a 15-day unpaid suspension.
Here’s the full text of Williams’s statement:
The real question is why these allegations are being made now, especially since one of the incidents occurred in September, and the others over the past several months. I was not disciplined for any of them at the time; my director asked me to write an explanation for 2 of the incidents, which I did; afterwards she did not ask to meet with me or express any further concern about them. She never even communicated with me about 2 of the charges.
