After-School Program Threatened

With just days remaining before the start of fall classes, the West Valley Boys & Girls Club is facing homelessness and an end to its affordable after-school programs used by hundreds of disadvantaged students.

The club, which had been at Woodland Hills’ Calvert Elementary School since 1995, was forced from that space early this summer to make more room for special education classes.

To buy time, The club’s 175-student summer camp moved to nearby Parkman Middle School. But Parkman is facing increased enrollment and can’t accommodate the more than 300 students in the club’s after-school programs, said Mike Bennett, a regional director for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Meanwhile, the club’s board spent the summer looking for new digs, but nothing panned out, board Chairwoman Rose Goldwater said.

For now, the nonprofit group is planning to retain its four full-time staff members--who will dedicate all their time to finding a space--but discontinue its programs, which give working parents a safe place to leave their 7- to 17-year-olds. The after-school care cost just $20 per student for the school year.

“It’s kind of scary,” said Kelsy Maruyama, the club’s unit director. “And it’s been kind of heartbreaking. I have parents asking me every day what’s going on. I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do. Most of them are going to have to pay for day care somewhere else, or leave [the kids] in an after-school playground program.”

The West Valley chapter is the only Boys & Girls Club in the Los Angeles area without a headquarters, said Ron Moeckel, regional service director for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Bob Brooks, the West Valley club president, said his chapter’s founders decided to locate on the Calvert Elementary campus as a convenience to students. The plan backfired when LAUSD enrollment increased, he said.

Softening the blow, Bennett says, is the LAUSD’s expansion of its “Beyond the Bell” after-school care program, which begins this fall on elementary and middle school campuses. However, the program consists mostly of organized play time, and doesn’t offer the homework help, environmental classes and organized sports offered by the Boys & Girls Club.

“This is an affordable, good place to go where [students] will have supervision and productive lives,” Goldwater said. “There’s nothing else around here.”

While club officials said they understand the school district’s need for space, they have grumbled about the short notice. They were given about a month to vacate Calvert, Goldwater said. Maruyama suggested other issues might have been a factor in the LAUSD’s decision.

“I don’t want to talk bad about the LAUSD, but I don’t understand what went wrong,” Maruyama said. “The school had some gripes [about us], and I think it just went up the ladder.”

Maruyama said Calvert administrators were concerned about the club’s “open-door” policy, which lets children come and go as they please.

Calvert administrators referred questions to the LAUSD’s Bennett, who said the policy troubled the school but had nothing to do with the decision to evict the club.

“When you have a need for a growing number of special ed classes, you just need to take the room,” Bennett said. “But . . . you have kids coming and going [from the campus]. It’s not good.”

Club officials said they would prefer a donated building of 2,500 to 10,000 square feet, plus 2,500 feet of outside play space, though they’re also willing to pay some rent.

If they can’t find the space, club programs will go dormant. The club plans to eventually move into a $40-million complex being developed in Canoga Park by L.A.-based nonprofit New Economics For Women.

That group recently purchased an old Department of Water and Power site at Saticoy Street and Canoga Avenue, and plans to build 119 affordable housing units, a charter school and a community center that the Boys & Girls Club could call home. But the group is still raising money, and doesn’t expect to have the center finished until late 2003, said Bea Stotzer, president of New Economics for Women’s board of directors.

For the club’s parents and students, the prospects until then seem dim.

“Now they’re going to have to wait in the after-school playground [program] until I get off work,” said Sheila Wilks, 33, who was picking up her son, daughter and two nieces Tuesday. “But with youth services, they just play on the playground. With the Boys & Girls Club, they have homework, they take computer classes, and they have real people talking to them. It’s nothing like day care.”