By Matt Pedigo (C-T Editor/Publisher), The Citizen-Times, Used with Permission)
Tour the old Allen County Vocational School beside Allen County-Scottsville High School, and you’ll hear the sounds of renovation. You’ll smell fresh paint.
Once facing an uncertain fate following the creation of the new Allen County Career and Technical Center, the 1969 building now has a new lease on life—for a mission still meant to help the lives of local youth.
The old vocational school will host Allen County’s new Boys and Girls Club, opening January 6, 2020. Last month, Franklin Boys and Girls Club Director Jef Goodnight and the woman who will lead the Allen County facility––Cassie Brown––met with The Citizen-Times for a preliminary tour.
The new non-profit, established with the financial backing of the Laura Goad Turner Charitable Foundation, will offer after-school activities for enrolled youth ages six through 18 until 7 p.m. daily, as well as being open for the summer and on school-year days when school isn’t session. The definite hours for those days are still to be determined, but may likely be 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., Goodnight said.
“We want to try to work with parents who work the early shift,” Goodnight said.
Summer hours are also still to be determined at this time. The summer program will include different activities, including field trips to area sites of interest.
“We want to be active in the community,” Goodnight said.
Affordability? How about $12 per child for the entire school year? Or $10 per five-day-week for the summer?
Snacks are offered in the after-school sessions and, in the summer, the Club will utilize the USDA Summer Feeding Program that the schools participate in to offer both breakfast and lunch in the summer.
Participants engage in the national Boys and Girls Club programs like “Positive Action.” This teaches them to turn around from bad choices they may have made and set positive goals. A related program, “Smart Moves,” teaches making good choices to begin with, including avoiding drug and alcohol abuse.
The program has two rooms full of computer stations where students can do—and receive help with—their homework assignments.
“We’ve got more computers here than the Franklin club,” Goodnight said.
And, yes, there’s fun—the old school’s former electricity shop is being converted to an activity center set to have pool tables, shuffleboard and other games, as well as a series of television stations for games and videos.
For the School District, Director of Buildings and Grounds Kelly Grizzle said, the Turner Foundation funding will make the building much more efficient. It’s being equipped with modern HVAC systems and LED lighting that drastically reduces energy use while actually being brighter than the higher-wattage older lighting. Also, where the old handwashing faucet is in the former shop, the new activity center will include a filtered water bottle filling station.
The site’s new unit director brings local roots and a lot of experience to the position. Cassie Brown, the daughter of Jimmy and Paula Brown of southern Allen County, is a 2003 graduate of Allen County-Scottsville High School. She attended Western Kentucky University for two years, then later graduated Bowling Green Technical College (now Southcentral Kentucky Community and Technical College), having earned an associate’s degree in web design and administration.
Yet, a few years before that, her career path had already taken a different turn. After her freshman year at WKU, Brown had taken a summer job with a Boys and Girls Club predecessor, Bowling Green’s Girls Inc.
“I thought it would be a summer job, but they couldn’t get rid of me,” she laughs. “I really enjoyed working with the older children. It wasn’t something I saw myself doing, but I built a good relationship with the families, and that allowed me connect with them.”
That enabled her to check on the kids and stay informed on the issues they were facing and where Girls Inc. or Boys and Girls Club could help. She was able to help parents, too, with issues on behalf of their children, like college application forms or athletic organization fees.
Brown was still there in 2009, when Girls Inc. merged and became the regional Boys and Girls Club––a chapter of the Atlanta-based national organization Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Inc. (bgca.org). In her years there, the Bowling Green facility had anywhere from 250 to 275 registered members and averaged a regular attendance of about 180.
Brown stayed on until May of 2018. For a time she worked for Bowling Green’s Best Buy store, until Paula read about the Allen County Boys and Girls Club in The Citizen-Times when it was announced in the September 16 meeting of the Allen County Board of Education. She urged Cassie to call Goodnight to apply.
She will oversee a program that differs logistically from the Bowling Green program, which had many of the families it served living in close proximity.
The Allen County program will have a county-wide reach, with many of its kids living miles out in the country.
To address that, the Boys and Girls Club has contracted with the School District to offer bus service. Kids go to the club after school, and are later bussed to the county volunteer fire department nearest their homes. Parents pick them up there.
“And we’re open until seven,” Brown points out. “That allows time for parents who are coming from Bowling Green or Glasgow.”’
The Club currently has approximately 25 applicants (as of mid December) and hopes to grow quickly. Applications are now being taken. Call (270) 618-3263 to make appointments to complete an application this week.
“This is going to be a great thing,” Goodnight said. “It’s exciting to think about where we’re going to be in five or 10 years.”