Girls Clubs Still Point the Way : They Have Been Shaping Young Lives for 40 Years

It doesn’t matter where a girl comes from, as long as she knows where she’s going.

--Motto of Girls Clubs of America

It’s a typical afternoon at the Chula Vista Girls Club, nestled in a frame house between Rice Elementary School and the Church of the Nazarene on L Street.

Two dozen girls are engaged in various activities inside. Others are on the school playground, being supervised by a club staff member. Others are playing soccer in the recently built gym on the site of a Boys’ Club and Girls Club on Oleander Avenue in Chula Vista that will be finished in July, 1987.

Inside the L Street house, two girls work on computers as others watch. Nearby are a piano and shelves of books.

Still more girls are exercising to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive.” Fifty girls may visit the club each day. Next door to the exercise class is the preschool room, full of bins neatly filled with blankets and clothes waiting for next morning’s charges. Posters decorate the walls--from Kermit the Frog to ones advising “A Creative Mess Is Better Than Tidy Idleness,” and “May I Help? Be Thoughtful.”

It has been more than 40 years since Girls Clubs of America began quietly and steadily improving the quality of life for girls. But the idea took hold unofficially in Waterbury, Conn., in 1864, during the Industrial Revolution. Rural young women who came to town to work in textile mills needed a safe place to meet and find companionship--so they met together and later included their daughters.

Today, the emphasis for Girls Clubs is on helping girls overcome discrimination and become economically independent women.

There are 240 Girls Clubs of America nationwide with a membership of 250,000 girls from ages 6 to 18.

The Girls Clubs of America National Resource Center in Indianapolis is the nation’s largest repository for data and studies on girls and girl-related trends.

Girls Help Themselves

“We are helping girls to help themselves,” said Marie Miehls, executive director of the Chula Vista club. “Girls think someone will take care of them.

“Girls Clubs differ from Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls in that we meet daily,” she said. “Most girls who come here (82%) are from single-parent or working-family homes and would be alone in the afternoon if they didn’t come to the club each day.”

Miehls came to the club 13 years ago as a single mother of four and a former teacher, to work part-time.

“When I came here, there was only one other employee,” she said. “I remember coming here and painting this building.”

Now Miehls, who has just finished a stint on the National Board of Girls Clubs of America, says: “The experience here has taught me a lot. I was only going to stay one to two years, but it is a challenge--teaching, fund-raising, knowing the community. It’s rewarding. You see kids feel good about this club, and parents come in and feel relieved. You can’t do all things for all people, but you can meet basic needs.”

Filling some of the basic needs of the girls includes helping them develop self-esteem, career awareness, good health and nutrition habits and math and science skills. In addition, there are efforts to help girls avoid becoming victims of child abuse or teen-age pregnancy.

The Girls Club of Chula Vista was organized in 1964. It has four full-time staff members, three part-timers, a secretary and several volunteers, Miehls said. Other San Diego County clubs are in San Diego on South 30th Street, Carlsbad, Oceanside, Vista, National City and El Cajon. Each club has programs to suit its community.

The San Diego Girls Club, the largest in the area with 1,325 members (110 daily during school and 200 in the summer), “is mostly minority,” Director Etta Keeler said.

The gymnastics program is popular there.

“We’re lucky to have a former Olympian to teach gym,” Keeler said. “This Girls Club has a strong emphasis on creative and performing arts as well,” she added.

The Carlsbad Girls Club is small, with 35 girls a day, but offers career exposure, recreation activities, and even has a “clownology” troupe. For a community service project this year, the club is painting litter barrels at Buena Vista Lagoon.

The Oceanside club averages 22 girls a day during the school year, 30 in the summer. The Vista club has about 60 girls daily and offers 35 classes a week, including gardening and cooking, according to director Vickie McDonald.

National City’s club has up to 50 girls attending each day, director Sheryl Hulsey said. The National City club is predominantly Latino, with a racially balanced staff, and has offered multicultural programs and films, Hulsey noted. The focus this year is on behavior guidance to help girls with emotional problems. “We have a lot of shy girls,” Hulsey said. “We often target certain girls and give them extra attention. We try to help them make friends. We also have a few sexually abused girls we work with.”

The Girls Club of El Cajon is not affiliated with Girls Clubs of America. It is headed by Jerry Fazio. About 100 girls come to the club each afternoon during school, and 160 in summer, Fazio said. Classes are offered in aerobics, ballet, woodcrafts and needlework.

National Programs

Besides programs designed to suit the distinct communities, national Girls Club programs are available, and Chula Vista uses several. One is Operation S.M.A.R.T., which increases girls’ access to, and involvement in, math, science and technology, and helps the girls understand the relevance of these skills to their everyday lives and future careers.

“Most girls have math anxiety,” Miehls said, “so it is very important for them to work with computers.”

Another program, “Choices,” focuses on career plans and sexuality--enabling girls to understand how choices they make will affect their future roles in the work force and family. Miehls said girls usually stay in the programs until age 16, though sometimes they remain in the sports programs until 18.

Miehls said the club hopes to help girls “plan their future and look at non-traditional jobs--to make choices.” Statistics from Girls Clubs of America show that 2 out of 5 girls will have sole responsibility for a family and that 9 out of 10 will work.

“Preventing Adolescent Pregnancy” is a program aimed at motivating girls to avoid the early pregnancies that can derail their efforts to be financially independent. Counseling, designed to suit the age of the girl, is provided in all Girls Clubs. The national office is involved in a three-year study of teen pregnancy, and the San Diego Girls Club is one of eight participating clubs.

“Girl Power: Health Power” motivates girls to assume long-term responsibility for their health and fitness, including education on drug and alcohol abuse. “We strive for open communication between families,” Miehls said.

“We want to meet the needs of the girl as a whole--mind, body--to buoy her up in a positive way.”

“Kid-Ability” is a child sexual abuse prevention program that teaches children and parents how to recognize potentially dangerous situations, as well as how to take appropriate action when help is needed. “We talk about what touches are good touches,” Miehls said.

Special Preschool Program

The Chula Vista club’s preschool program began last year as part of a project with the Sweetwater School District that provides vocational training for adults. The club provides high-quality, low-cost ($2 a day) child care for the children of the adults in the training program.

“Soon the Sweetwater School District will be training senior citizens to work in the preschool program here,” Miehls said.

“Once the seniors are trained to work in the child-care program, then these older adults will be able to go into the homes of the parents, and care for their children. So, it is a circle.”

The club’s building opens at 6:30 a.m. for the 28 youths who attend preschool until 2 p.m. If the program is not filled by children of parents in the adult school project, other children are admitted on a sliding fee scale, Miehls said.

The club, which serves 450 girls a year, according to Miehls, has an annual budget of $155,000 and receives $29,000 annually from United Way. The remainder must be come from donations, service clubs and fund raising. (Recently the club showed the “Star Trek” film trilogy at the Spreckels Theatre as a fund raiser.)

Keeler, director of the San Diego Club, said: “Girls Clubs are funded far less than Boys’ Clubs. We have a long way to go to catch up with equal funding.”

The new Girls Club in Chula Vista will be ready by July, 1987. It will share the gym with a new Boys’ Club, but each club will remain separate.

Girls Stand Apart

Miehls said she believes girls’ programs are extremely important. “Girls need to be set aside for career planning and leadership,” she said. The national office agrees, believing that, to stand as equals, girls and adolescent women need time to stand apart.

At the Chula Vista club there are a few male members--under 8 years old. Miehls said the boys are exceptions, usually younger brothers of girls who come to the center and who have no place else to go.

“But we’re not geared to help them specifically,” she said.

Because many of the girls are from single-parent homes and may have been through the trauma of divorce or other problems, Miehls said extra effort is made to build the girls’ self-esteem and provide resources for the future. In addition, 63% of the girls are from low-income families. “It’s some job to make them positive about things,” Miehls said. “They need to feel they are important. They are cared about here. It’s positive.”

The girls who come each day after school pay annual dues of $10. The all-day summer program costs $20 a month and includes free lunch.

Jocelyn Gonzalez has long dark hair, is 10 1/2 years old and has been coming to the club from Rice Elementary School next door for 5 1/2 years.

Jocelyn said she started coming to the club because she “got bored at home. Then I started enjoying it, and now my mom has started working afternoons.”

‘A Lot of Friends’

Corinne MacDonald, also 10 1/2, is tall with light brown hair and a shy smile and likes cooking, cake decorating and sports. She said the club “keeps me busy all day, and I have a lot of friends.”

The Girls Club van, driven by Steve Guvara for 10 years, stops at 11 schools each afternoon to pick up girls and take them to the Chula Vista club. One of the regular riders from Concordia Junior High is 12-year-old Sewah Johnson, who has been coming to the club since she was 9 and has learned cake decorating so well that she was asked to teach a class to the younger girls.

“I’ve met a lot of neat friends here, and I think I’ll hang on for a long time, too,” Sewah said. “They’re great friends.”

“Girls Club centers are in on what’s happening with girls,” Miehls said. “We build up girls to do anything they put their minds to. It’s important you know who you are, and you have to do the best you know how to do. We’re teaching these lives here to do their best.”

Jocelyn swung her legs and leaned back in Miehl’s office chair. Her evaluation of the club’s atmosphere:

“It’s like I’m going to my aunt’s every day.”