Boys & Girls Club takes on distance learning

Carpinteria Boys & Girls Club helps kids keep up in school

BY DEBRA HERRICK

Carpinteria’s United Boys & Girls Club has now reopened to offer families a school day program. Members of the program take part in their school’s distance learning from the safety of the club with supplies and help from club staff. While the program currently serves 28 children, they have the capacity to serve up to 84. What’s stopping them? They need to raise scholarship money to get kids off the waiting list and into their classrooms.

The school day program runs from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., offering a significant amount of relief to working families who need a safe place for their children to keep up with their schools’ distance learning programs. The club also offers a free afterschool program from 3 to 6 p.m. Both programs have a staff to child ratio of 1 to 14. To serve more children, the club will also need to hire more staff, a process that has already begun, according to Carpinteria Club Director Don Hall. As of now, there are 51 kids on the waiting list. Hall expects to bring 14 more kids into the club in a new school day class on Sept. 8, but he wishes it was more. “Parents are very grateful that the program is available for their children,” he said.

To reopen the club safely, the organization worked out the details of their operating plan at the Santa Barbara Downtown Club over the summer and received “best practice” information from other Boys & Girls Clubs nationwide. They also received advice from Canalino Elementary Counselor Shanna Hargett and Aliso Elementary Counselor Bert Dannenberg. “They have been great at providing us with support and ‘how-to’ info,” said Hall.

Reopening with new pandemic-based rules has meant an adjustment process for club members and their parents, as well. Hall noted, “We’ve had to reeducate our parent and our club members about our safety protocols—wear a mask, maintain six feet of social distance and frequently wash your hands—and the fact that our programs are now enrollment based as opposed to drop-in.”

For decades, the Carpinteria Club has provided a safe space and a sense of stabilFLY BY FRAN DAVIS

It’s hard to hang on to optimism when everything—including the way we live our lives—seems to be coming apart at the seams. Optimism is an elusive critter at best and any bad day can send it skittering away.

During the final weeks of August when the weather turned brutal and the sky pressed down like a hot plate and we hunkered in our houses with the drapes drawn, optimism was AWOL.

Though I’m optimistic by nature, my bright outlook has begun to fade. So, I’ve been looking around for some hopeful signs, things that buoy the spirit. In a film I once saw, a character played by Peter Falk

KARLSSON PHOTOS

Jayce Bryant and his Boys & Girls Club classmates sit six-feet apart and attend school through distance learning.

Caught being good is Brayan Pantaleon Ortiz.

Safety is Club Director Don Hall’s priority.

ity for children, as well as identifying signs of abuse, all of heightened need during the pandemic. As Hall prepares his staff each day to work with Carpinteria youth he said something like, “When you’re in a sh--t storm, you’d better have a good umbrella.”

We’re in one of those storms now— Covid still running rampant, business shutdowns, unemployment, schools in disarray, hurricanes and floods, civil unrest, politics in shambles, and an abdication of responsibility at the highest levels of government.

I’ve gotten my umbrella out of the closet, not a very grand one, but sufficient for now, and I’m counting the spokes, each one sturdy enough to hold a hope. They are the simple things we can see or discover every day and find comfort in.

The sun will go on rising, bright or shining through fog, gifting us with another beautiful day on the South Coast, with cool mornings, warm afternoons.

The great ever-present ocean. Just breathing ocean’s breath, cool and salty, refreshes minds and spirits. The place where land and sea meet is another kind of place, a new geography, a place to be rediscovered over and over. At the beach, your eye and foot are always drawn to the moving light of water, ears tuned to the thump and drawl of the tide. Standing at land’s end, gazing at the vast curve of ocean and space is an affirmation of reminds them that “safety is our number one job during these challenging times. We need to follow our policies and procedures

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Hanging on to optimism

to ensure everyone’s safety.” limitless possibility.

The trains keep running, their reassuring hoot through town proof that life keeps moving on. Whether you are a train rider or a train spotter, you can appreciate those powerful engines pulling their silver coaches and boxcars, doing their work, keeping to schedule.

People rediscovering the great outdoors. The national parks are bursting at the seams with new campers delving into the pleasures of outdoor living, walking in the woods, learning the names of trees and plants, spotting animals, tasting the air, and appreciating the land saved and set aside for this purpose.

Gardens, victory gardens, springing up everywhere, from window boxes and backyard gardens to community gardens. Nurseries and home improvement stores are doing a booming business. Being outside, our bones soak up sun-giving vitamin D and grow stronger. Our toil is rewarded with vegetables, fruit and flowers. We become more joyful. Working with the earth is sustaining to body and mind. Studies reveal that the smell of earth releases serotonin in the brain, lifting spirits.

Music! Music is busting out all over, using all kinds of instruments, whatever is available—pans, glasses, sticks, trash cans. People are composing new melodies, new songs. People are playing and singing from balconies and porches. CoastalView.com Dozens of kids, electronically connected, are playing and singing together. Listen to One Voice Children’s Choir on YouTube and your heart will sing along. People CoastalView are reviving and redoing old songs or replacing them with better or, in some .com cases, more appropriate lyrics. The hiphop artist RZA composed a new tune for the Good Humor ice cream trucks to reCoastalView place the old “Turkey in the Straw” once sung by minstrels in black face. You can .com hear this on YouTube, too. Where there is music there will always be hope.

One good thing: Optimism, resilience and hope in the face of great and daunting challenges are part of the American character.

Fran Davis has been writing for CVN for over 25 years. Now wielding her pen from Goleta, she shares her thoughts on the vagaries of life and the times we live in. An award-winning writer and freelance editor, she has published work in magazines, print and online journals, anthologies and travel books.