GLENDALE : Lack of Support Closes Teen Center

At the end of the month, a simple filing of paperwork will make legal an unpleasant reality for youth in Glendale: The Glendale Teen Support Center is dead.

“It was one of the first programs, I felt, that asked the youth what they thought they needed,” said Don Sweetnam, president of the center’s board of directors, who voted last month to end the program because of a lack of funding and community support.

The center, which opened almost exactly two years ago in a refurbished former dental office on Lexington Drive, had Ping-Pong and pool tables, a television room, soda fountain and study room where teen-agers could hang out, relax and make friends.

A lack of money forced the center to close in February, and although organizers had hoped to reopen in August, a $100,000 fund-raising drive only brought in $48,000 in pledges and donations.

Already, the group has written letters saying that pledges will not be collected and its leaders continue to meet with those who made cash donations to determine whether the money will be returned.

Those donations, only a small part of the $48,000, could go to the Glendale YWCA or to a community foundation fund for youth programs in Glendale, depending on the donors’ wishes, Sweetnam said.

“We didn’t want it to linger on,” Sweetnam said. “We needed to measure the community support of the program.”

The board of directors voted to disband on Oct. 10. The formal paperwork dissolving the support center is to be filed with the state by the end of November, Sweetnam said.

“I think we’re back to where we started,” said Sweetnam. “I’m very concerned that the teens of Glendale don’t have anywhere to go.”

Since the center closed its doors, there have been reports of teen-agers hanging out more at local libraries and shopping centers, causing complaints from businesses, Sweetnam said. But at least some of the ideas started by the support center will continue, he said.

One of these is a peer conflict management program in which teen-agers were taught to understand the root causes of conflict such as racial bias and prejudice. That program has spread throughout the city’s school district, he said.

Glendale’s problems with ethnic and racial conflicts could be worse than they are now had it not been for the influence of the support center, Sweetnam said.

He said he is unsure about why the group lost community support. “I don’t know that answer,” he said. “But teens are not a very popular population.”

When the group started, it surveyed teen-agers and found out that they especially needed a place they could call their own and where they could be listened to without being judged. The center was created to meet that need, Sweetnam said.