Summer programs face cutbacks

Associated Press

NEW YORK

When his parents couldn’t afford to send him to summer camp, Port Lau settled in for a summer at home: Eating. Sleeping. Playing video games.

With no one supervising him most of the time, it could have felt like a summer of leisure in New York City. Instead, it was excruciatingly boring.

That’s the kind of school break a rising number of kids can look forward to this year as budget crises in places such as New York, Washington, D.C., Houston and Detroit rob children of the activities and programs that long have defined summer in the city for urban youngsters. Swimming pools are being closed; recreation centers are locking their doors; library summer-reading programs are suffering; openings for short-term jobs have evaporated.

Lau’s vacations of boredom ended the summer he was 14, when a city-funded program got him his first job — doing filing and clerical work at the state Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Now 18, the college freshman credits the experience with landing him a string of jobs and internships — including one for which he’ll be traveling to Germany this summer.

But in New York City, the youth-employment program that got him the job is facing a cut of more than $15 million, which means that this year, the program is slated to have 10,000 fewer spots for young people age 14 to 24 — a reduction of nearly one-third.

The stories are similar elsewhere. In Washington, D.C., a summer camp for children whose families come from Ethiopia is losing its city funding, as are more than half the city-funded summer-camp programs serving low-income communities. In Detroit, the youth summer-jobs program is expected to be down to just 1,200 spots — cut from 7,500 two years ago.

This year and last, declines in revenue and reductions in spending across the country are steeper than at any other point in the last quarter-century, according to a National League of Cities survey.

For parents coping with the unique challenges of urban child-rearing, it can be hard to imagine summer without public programs.

“In New York City, it’s not like we can open our doors and all of our kids can run out and play,” Manhattan resident Tracy Ranson said while keeping an eye on her 2-year-old son at a crowded playground. “You need some kind of program for these kids.”