Key Manatee Boys & Girls Club program hurt by state budget cuts
MANATEE -- On the second floor of the Boys & Girls Club of Manatee County's Desoto branch, teens were learning Monday how to write a resume and conduct themselves in job interviews.
The teens, who are also learning how to make good choices, are in Smart Moves, part of the club's unique outreach and prevention program run by Korey Waters. The program includes gang prevention and mentoring of kids on probation, teen court kids and those in juvenile alternative programs, Waters said.
Cuts in this year's state budget totaling nearly $5 million from the Florida Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs, of which Manatee is a part, mean the program will see cuts in 2015-16, Dawn Stanhope, president of Boys & Girls Clubs of Manatee County, said Monday.
"We lost 13 percent of our annual budget when the Florida Alliance was cut," said Stanhope who calculates the clubs' lost at $219,000 in state funding. "Outreach and Prevention started out with 10 specialists and now will be left with three. The three will have to split time between all seven of our locations."
A total of 14 jobs were affected clubwide, Stanhope added.
The club's Outreach and Prevention program, among other things, teaches job skills and character-building and provides mentorship to youths from age 8 to 17, Waters said. The program served 825 kids in 2014-2015, he said.
"Each of these kids is different," Waters said. "It could be a kid with trouble at home with parents. It could be a kid headed down a wrong
path. It could be a kid confused about things in life with no one to talk to."
On Monday, two kids, Jalisa, 11, and Christopher, 10, said they benefited from Smart Moves.
"I filled out a resume and did role playing with an interview with Jeremy," Christopher said, referring to teen director Jeremy Shelby.
"I learned in the program not to use drugs and never to use a gun to settle your problems," Jalisa, 11, said.
Family, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, judges and law enforcement officers refer the kids to the program, Waters said.
Stanhouse said it was a gut-wrenching decision to focus the majority of the cuts on Outreach and Prevention but after-school programs, which are the heart of the clubs, also will feel pain.
"We have also told the directors of our seven branches to be careful about how many kids they sign up for the school year," Stanhouse said. "We will have a smaller staffing ratio due to the cuts. We will have families on waiting lists this year. We will have to work within the confines of our budget."
Waters is disappointed in lawmakers' decision to cut funding for Boys & Girls Clubs. An independent study by Florida TaxWatch found that the economic impact of participating in Boys & Girls Clubs provides taxpayers benefits of $5,000 for each student kept out of the juvenile justice system and $46,000 by not incarcerating a youth.
"We are going to have a lot of kids that we can't serve," Waters said. "They will lose the mentorship, the character-based curriculum, a large part of that has been deleted."
The Manatee clubs have an annual budget of $3.4 million, supported primarily by local contributions from individuals and foundations with county and state funding accounting for the remainder.
Richard Dymond, Herald reporter, can be reached at 941-745-7072 or contact him via Twitter@RichardDymond.
This story was originally published August 4, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Key Manatee Boys & Girls Club program hurt by state budget cuts ."