Katherine Palmer, chief executive officer of the Boys and Girls Club of Brown County, dropped by KOXE Wednesday morning for an interview discussing the start of the after school program, which begins Wednesday, Aug. 19.
“We are gearing up to open our regular after school program,” Palmer said. “We will start that the very first day of school which is next Wednesday, Aug. 19. Right now we have staff in the building doing a deep clean, reorganizing all of our activity supplies, shifting furniture, all that good stuff.”
Due to a COVID-19 mandate from the governor’s office, the Boys and Girls Club will be limited to 80 kids with no more than 10 at a time in a room.
“We do still have some size limitations,” Palmer said. “As an order from the governor we have to keep our kids in groups of 10, so that does limit our numbers a little bit. In the spring we were running about 115 kids a day, and we are limited to 80 right now. I don’t really know how many of our members from the spring are planning to do schooling from home and might not be coming back anyway.”
Registration is currently available online at bgcbrownwood.org.
“At the top of the very first page is a button that says register for school year, so you can go in there and fill out all the information about your kiddos,” Palmer said. “I’ll be making phone calls later this week to verify that they do have a spot, and we’ll get dues paid which are still $30 per month per child. That is for after school care every day that the schools are open.”
A new aspect to the Boys and Girls Club this school year will be the ‘teen room.’
“We received some funding from a local grant that would allow us to do some repairs and buy some furniture to open a teen room,” Palmer said. “That is for middle school members, so that is seventh grade up. The teen room is their own place away from the younger kids. We also have two age groups for elementary school aged kids, the cubs which is third grade and below and the lions is fourth through sixth grade.
“We were getting some middle school members and they didn’t need to be doing the same activities as fourth grades, that’s a big age jump, so they will have their own room with their own activities and a little more freedom. They will still have some structured activities they are doing, but they will be allowed to have their cell phones in the teen room and we have some video game consoles in there, arts and crafts supplies, they’ve got their own computers in there and we’ll set up a printer if they’ve got homework they need to work on.”
This past Friday, the Boys and Girls Club concluded its summer program, which started in May. From spring break until the reopening in May, the Boys and Girls Club’s door were closed and it adopted virtual activities.
“While we were shut down we had to get really creative because we had all these staff members that still needed to work, so we transitioned to doing virtual activities,” Palmer said. “They are still all up on our YouTube and our Facebook pages. We had daily workouts we were posting, arts and crafts activities, some computer-based activities, we had some daily brain teasers and also offered full day tutoring. Any kids could call in on Zoom and meet with our tutors to help with their work assignments they had that the school sent out.”
Palmer added that due to staffing, virtual activities will not continue.
“We don’t have an abundance of staff,” Palmer said. “We have to keep pretty much the same number of staff as we normally would, and we normally run at the ratio of one staff member to every 15 to 20 kids, so we have to keep the same number of staff to run all our rooms, and we can only put 10 club members in a room.”
Additional information regarding safety concerns will be provided by Palmer prior to the Aug. 19 open date.
“I’ll have more information coming out over the next few days and into early next week about exactly what it will look like in the club,” Palmer said. “We have a board meeting and a safety committee meeting to look at our summer policies related to coronavirus and safety and adjust them for what we need to do for the school year. Then I will be sending out an orientation video to all of the parents who have registered explaining what they can expect, what it’s going to look like and what’s going to be different, because there’s going to be a lot that is different than what we’re used to.”
The Boys and Girls Club of Brown County is located at 1701 Avenue L in Brownwood and can be reached via phone at 325-641-2582.
