Schrier visits Lake Chelan Boys & Girls Club as federal cuts loom

Take a tour of the new Lake Chelan Boys & Girls Club inside the Chelan Community Center with unit director Angela Collins and you’ll see up close and personal what programs aimed at school-age children can do, aside from just keeping them occupied during summer or before and after school.

Inside the key-carded facility, you can find an endless number of things for kids to do and learn. The Boys & Girls Club has taken the acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and added an “A” for art. The sprawling upper floor is populated with computers, recording stations, fitness stations, art and supplies, books and even a learning station that doubles as a karaoke stage. The spacious homework room, or tech center, has desks for enough kids to fill a standard classroom and more.

Inside the teen room, the computers are even more high end, there’s a DJ station, three gaming consoles with gaming chairs in front of them and another giant instruction display that also functions as a karaoke station. There are even two state-of-the-art virtual reality headsets to experiment with.

This stuff is already paid for, mostly privately. Operating costs are coming out of the Boys & Girls Club’s budget for now, although there will be fee-based programs for athletics and before- and after-school childcare. That will allow the club to accept childcare subsidies from the state as well in order to maintain a high level of service without running out of money.

They’re also planning fee-based attendance for some kids to try and accommodate the Manson students who are now facing a 4-day school week and will likely flood the center on Fridays.

So, for now, this club is safe, but only because when they built it, they’re weren’t planning on federal funds. And those centers that did are facing cuts that could cripple the level of service they provide. Make no mistake — “We don’t close clubs. Once we come into a community, we will figure it out,” says Marci Volmer, the President of Boys and Girls Club of Snohomish County. Her chapter of the organization oversees some clubs on this side of the state as well.

“Luckily, since this club just opened, they already opened in a time of uncertainty, and so we weren’t counting on any federal funding. But in the future, we are counting on getting licensed and getting those subsidies. If that gets cut at the federal level and trickles down to the state, that would be a major problem for all of our locations,” Volmer says. “And the federal food programs? This club doesn’t have them yet, but only because it just opened. If that went away, that’s another avenue that would close to us in the future.”

Indeed, SNAP, WIC, school lunch and breakfast programs and more are all on the chopping block in the other Washington, making essential organizations and centers like this one even more reliant on grants and just plain old charity.

That’s why Congresswoman Kim Schrier has come to talk to organizers and directors, so she can take their concerns back to her D.C. office. She’s mostly visiting to just have a conversation and tour the facility, but she’s clearly single-minded in her opposition to the federal funding cuts that have been hitting programs that need them the most.

Even when talking about the Chelan Post Office, which has been closed since March, she laments the lack of action from the Postal Service at the federal level to either speed up the restoration of service as normal or provide more adequate accommodations for postal customers. “It kind of makes you wonder if they’re trying to make everything not function so they can privatize it,” she says.

Schrier’s Central Washington Manager, Ruby Gaston, expounds on that specific concern. “Everyone who’s reached out, I’ve gotten back to them personally. People aren’t just concerned with their own service, they’re also worried about the postal employees’ conditions, they’re worried about elderly folks getting their medication through the mail — aside from the fact that it’s the Post Office. You’re supposed to be able to go to the Post Office.”

While the Post Office hasn’t been as fortunate as the Lake Chelan Boys & Girls Club, there are also no charity golf tournaments or fundraisers for them. Facilities like the one Angela Collins will take you on a tour of at the Chelan Community Center, it seems, are there but for the good hearts of fellow citizens.

But kids rely on things like this when their parents are working, or when their families can’t afford traditional childcare. And if the hammer falls in Washington, D.C., those kids’ lifeline outside of school could be cut. Volmer’s new tagline is “In this time of cuts, the only thing we’re cutting is ribbons.” But with so much riding on their continued operation and even expansion, just opening clubs will only go so far.