Improving access to summer programs has become an increasingly common refrain from youth and family advocates — as well as county police and officials with the health and recreation departments — who cite such opportunities as critical for stifling gangs, stymieing childhood obesity and reaching out to immigrants and new residents.
‘‘We know more and more that the divide between the haves and have-nots is getting greater,” said Melanie Coffin, manager of the recreation department’s Team Teen, an array of two dozen programs tailored to reach those in the gap years between 13 and 16, when teens are ‘‘too old to go to traditional camps and too young to start working.”
Though Montgomery County has one of the highest median incomes in the country, it also has one of the highest poverty rates. Nearly 15,000 children — 7.9 percent of the county’s total — live below the federal poverty line, and more than half live in households that make less than $33,000 a year, according to a recent report analyzing federal and county statistics from 2006 by the Montgomery County Collaboration Council for Children, Youth and Families.
Families that qualify for a state or federal poverty program such as food stamps can get financial assistance for county recreation programs, up to $150 per child.
The value of the financial aid the county has provided for summer programs has grown from $335,000 in 2002 to $920,000 this year — though only about 60 percent of the funding is actually used, Coffin said.
County Executive Isiah Leggett’s Positive Youth Development Initiative and the report by the Montgomery Collaboration Council has put focus on giving young people somewhere safe and productive to spend their summers.
The county’s counselor-in-training program serves about 500 youth, but that fills up in February. Six sports clinics are capped at 100 youths each week. The county’s five teen centers each see between 40 and 70 kids per week.
This summer, the county has added two programs — Leadership Challenge and Career Quest — to handle the overflow.
Reaching out
Despite the efforts, some families still fall through the cracks, especially among recent immigrant families that have not familiarized themselves with the county’s array of resources, said Sheri Clem, staff development teacher at Capt. James Daly Elementary School in Germantown.
At Daly, school staff and county police have teamed to help give a group of more than 40 children from a nearby trailer park a better outlook and skill set.
Illustrating the lengths necessary to keep youths from idling through the summer, the all-volunteer effort gives children at Daly and their siblings at Neelsville Middle School two hours once a week of exercise, art time and mentoring from the 10 Daly teachers and spouses that form the core group.
Clem and county police Officer Marcus Dixon, of the county’s 5th District, put the plan together in a few short weeks this spring. Clem went classroom to classroom in search of her target audience: Latino families from the nearby Middlebrook Mobile Home Park.
‘‘One of the first questions I was asked by a third-grader when I was telling them about it was, ‘Is it free?’ And then a bunch of them started clapping,” Clem said last week as the kids filed home from Plum Gar Community Center with their parents. ‘‘Free and nearby; those are the two big incentives... . These parents don’t know to sign up for things four months in advance, and don’t have the cash to sign up, anyway.”
At the Wednesday night sessions, they are doing it with supplies left over from the school year, a core group of 10 teachers and their spouses volunteering their time, at least 1,000 donated books, and about $250 from Lockheed Martin for snacks and incidental costs.
The goal is ‘‘to build the relationship with the parents and hopefully increase the trust to get them to come into the school more, be it volunteering or conferences or whatever. To feel comfortable to know that they have a few safe people that they can communicate with,” Clem said. ‘‘Even though I don’t speak Spanish, they know my face now and know that, ‘I can go to her and she’ll help me.’ Because a lot of these are parents we are not getting in as often as we would like to. We’re trying to increase that presence... and hopefully get a new generation going in a positive direction.”
The plan is to segue into the school year and battle back against lower academic scores and higher rates of disciplinary problems among the school’s Latino and African American students.
Ten-year-old Janeily Perez looks forward to those two hours all week.
By all accounts, she is a model student, having just finished fifth grade as co-class president. Still, it can be hard straddling her two worlds — one at home speaking Spanish with her parents, the other at school, living in her English world with her friends.
The lessons she’s learned only five weeks in have become mantra.
‘‘It’s good to connect with your parents, and not to get into gangs, and not to spend too much time with your friends because you learn from them instead of your parents,” she said.
Her eyes brighten and grow wide when she says she can’t wait to come back next summer.
