It’s easy to call for public/private partnership. It’s a lot harder to pull it off.
The newly announced partnership between Elkhart Community Schools and Boys & Girls Clubs of Elkhart County is exactly the kind of partnership for which one would hope and those involved in hammering out the details are doing the right thing.
The school system and the nonprofit will jointly fund a multimillion dollar Boys & Girls Club facility at the site of Beardsley Elementary School and share space there. It’ll be a full-service facility — the first one in Elkhart — that will be open to elementary, middle and high school students who want to go to the club after school.
Elkhart Boys & Girls Club has after-school programs at North Side, Osolo and Beardsley schools, but Elkhart is the largest city in Indiana without a full-service club, said Kevin Deary, president and CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of Elkhart County.
Elkhart Community Schools has the task of educating the young people of Elkhart and Bristol. Residents pay tax dollars and trust the school system to use the money wisely in that effort.
Boys & Girls Clubs of Elkhart County has a long history of helping young people when the schools are done with that work for the day. For decades in Goshen and shorter periods of time in Elkhart, Nappanee and Middlebury, the nonprofit agency has raised money to offer affordable after-school activities, mentoring and tutoring for thousands of young people.
The approach and methods aren’t identical, but the goal of the school system and the Boys & Girls Clubs is the same: to help young people mature, learn and stay safe while they’re doing so.
The school system is held accountable for how it educates our young people and attendance is mandatory. Participation at the Boys & Girls clubs is voluntary and the accountability has to be demonstrated to the donors who support the efforts that help those young people and their families.
There are questions to resolve, such as what happens to the programs at Osolo and North Side. Answering those wisely will be important for those who rely on those programs.
The Boys & Girls Club is relatively new to Elkhart. Tolson Center is funded by the city. Lifeline is raising money for a new building on the south side. Deary says there’s more than enough work for all of them and they all work together.
This model of a nonprofit and a school system joining forces on a project has been done in Toledo, but is new here. If this model is successful, it could become a model for more sites after Beardsley.
Deary, Elkhart School Superintendent Rob Haworth and others have been deliberate in considering and planning. Boards for both organizations have approved the partnership, and Community Foundation of Elkhart County has already pledged money.
It takes money to educate or conduct activities for children after school. The Boys & Girls Club could build a gleaming new standalone facility in Elkhart, but that would take even more money. It’s already raising millions to build at Beardsley.
Figuring out how to successfully combine taxpayer money with private funds to pay for a single project is difficult, but it’s exactly the kind of work that should be done to make the best use of both. It’s investing in Elkhart in this way that should yield stronger kids, healthier families and a better community.