FOR KIDS’ SAKE

from SCRTC Community Network Jan./Feb. 2020

Center of attention

FOR KIDS’ SAKE

Boys & Girls Club of Glasgow-Barren County serving vital need

story by John Clayton

The number of young people who belong to the Boys & Girls Club of Glasgow-Barren County is a testament to the club’s success and its important role in the community.

The Boys & Girls Club serves about 130 young people ages 6 to 18, offering after-school programs during the academic year and afternoon summer camps during summer breaks.

“We have a little over 200 kids who are registered, which means some of those kids can kind of fluctuate in and out, but for the most part our average daily attendance is very consistent with the same kids coming,” says Mallie Boston, executive director for the Boys & Girls Club of Glasgow-Barren County. “That being said, we’ve got binders on top of binders with names. If a whole group of kids left tonight, we could fill back up within the afternoon.

“We have this wonderful building that’s fairly new, and it serves the kids that we have, but we’re always looking for ways to grow, because the need is not going to go away anytime soon,” Boston says. The annual fee for memberships in the nonprofit Boys & Girls Club is $45, which includes study time for homework, mentoring and tutoring, and after-school meals.

“When you look at the community, there is no other place in Barren County that you can pay $45 for an entire year and have your child get a hot meal every afternoon,” Boston says. “They get oneon-one tutoring, and adults in our community mentor here, which means your kid can not only have the staff here at the Boys & Girls Club, but members of the community come to see them and work on specific things with them.”

BOSTON CALLING

Boston began working as a volunteer at the Boys & Girls Club while she was a high school student. Now 24, the Glasgow native grew up seeing the challenges facing young people in the area.

She wasn’t just someone helping the youth of the area, though. She was one of them. When she was an undergraduate at Western Kentucky University, Boston continued to volunteer and work part-time at the club, doing practically every job on the list and inventing a few of her own. “After classes, I kept coming back to Glasgow and working here,” Boston says. “A couple of years ago, I moved back to Glasgow and decided that this was something I wanted to do. I knew my passion for it had been pretty consistent. I wanted to continue to be a part of it, and I could see that there were things within our organization that I wanted to change and make better for our youth. So, yeah, this is definitely something that is passion-driven.” Since taking over the role as the club’s executive director, Boston has returned to familiar stomping grounds, working with teachers and administrators in the Glasgow school system and her alma mater, Glasgow High.

“It’s been really exciting to get to work with my school and the teachers that I used to have and partnering with our kids to work on college applications and different things like that,” Boston says. “It’s been really neat to see the other perspective of all the great things that Barren County Schools offer, as well as seeing that there’s a really good balance. I’m in a great spot to be the middleman, working with these kids and getting them what they need.”

FINDING THE ‘WHY’

At a relatively young age, Boston has found her “why” — the reason behind the life she lives and the job she does. She says she asks her staff at the Boys & Girls Club to do the same thing. “If you don’t have that, you’re not going to start with the kids correctly,” she says.

Founded locally in 2006, the Boys & Girls Club focuses on character and leadership, academic success and healthy lifestyles. Quite often, Boston says, those things can be in short supply in homes. “I lived in a household that dealt with a lot of the same problems that most of the households in Kentucky in general deal with,” she says.

The club provides transportation from all Glasgow city schools, Red Cross Elementary, Eastern Elemen tary, Temple Hill Elementary, North Jackson Elementary, Barren County High, Trojan Academy and Barren County Middle School. There is lim ited van transportation from North Jackson Elementary.

Most of the time, the children at the Boys & Girls Club have no control over the things going on around them, and sometimes parents are not equipped with the tools they need for successful parenting. Grandparents or extended family members are raising some of the children, and poverty and addiction are too often challenges facing the adults in the region. All of those things make the mission of the Boys & Girls Club even more vital in Boston’s eyes.

“There are a lot of children that are being taken out of their homes, and when it gets down to it, a lot of the reasons are because of their parents not having the resources that they should already have from their community,” she says. “We as a community have to do better at identifying and humanizing issues like alcohol and drug abuse and lower-income families who didn’t necessarily have the proper education on how to take care of household budgets to court standards. We’ve got to find a way to keep these kids in our homes and to make sure that mom and dad have what they need.”