Next year Levels will turn 30. How has Levels stayed young, fresh, relevant even without a face-lift?

The current director of Levels, Ethan Mann, says that Joe Covina who was the executive director of the library in 1974 was a "visionary" who when confronted with the fact that teens were seldom using the library came up with the idea of creating a cultural arts center geared to spark their involvement and interest. He understood that teens learn best by hands on experience, by having opportunities to make decisions, by taking risks in the context of an unobtrusive safety net and by learning from each other.

Easy to say. Adults can be pretty good at being authoritarians. It takes more time, more sensitivity, and more patience to create an atmosphere where teens make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions, but that is the key to the success of Levels.

The theater program is perhaps the most visible program at Levels and it clearly demonstrates the philosophy. Teens who become eligible for Levels when they enter the seventh-grade and who are welcomed to come back to participate even after they have left for college, research possibilities and vote on the plays to be presented. It is because of their input that Levels produces cutting edge plays like Bang! Bang! You're Dead, Little Shop of Horrors or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was after seeing Bang! Bang!, a powerful play about the underlying factors that contributed to the spate of school violence that we have witnessed in recent years, that we felt moved to write an editorial in support of Levels. It is a brave play. After the play, members of the audience and the cast discussed the feelings it elicited. It was a memorable evening in which we as adults felt part of the Levels community and shared a candid, meaningful discussion about the effects of bullying and cruelty with our teens.

Every aspect of the production is run by the teens. They design the sets, cast the roles, direct the actors, work the sound system and light the lights. Mr. Mann says, "Kids are going to take risks and stretch themselves. It's not that we're so high-minded in supporting the kids' decision making; we want them to take those risks in a creative way and in a place where they'll be safe."

But Levels offers many other opportunities for creativity. The three full-time and three part-time staff members provide guidance in dance, music, video production, creative writing and puppetry. In fact, Barry Weil, the assistant director, is a Levels graduate who is considered one of the top puppeteers in the country.

In the coming months as the library expansion program is reviewed by the community, questions may arise about what Levels is all about. It is a program that adheres to the belief that the teen years are more than an awkward, troublesome phase between the halcyon days of childhood and the "maturity" of adulthood. Rather, they are years of intense questioning of the status quo, conformity and society's values that sometimes make us as adults squirm and if we are open to it, make us honest.

- Carol Frank