Keep these kids stationed here

Joye Brown

April 20, 2006

'This club has kept me off the street and kept me out of the gang."

"I would like to help the kids like the 5- and 8-year-olds by working with them on their homework so they can do better in school."

"I learned how to read more and how to write more and that's a great thing because my mommy said I'm learning more and studying more to get more good grades."

So wrote the children of the Huntington Station Enrichment Center in an assignment about what the center means to them. For months, the Town of Huntington has been trying to decide what to do with the center, which includes a chapter of The Boys and Girls Club of America.

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The building is easy to miss. It sits on a corner in a community where wealth and poverty don't spend a lot of face time with each other.

The center, which has occupied a building on New York Avenue near Depot Road for 10 years, is being evicted for no longer being able to afford $7,000 rent a month for 5,000 square feet of space.

It's important to hear what the children have to say about their facility:

"The club shouldn't close down because I am learning how to play the piano and drawing."

"It's fun to be with everybody as a group because some kids would probably be on the street."

"I can talk to someone about my feelings."

Outside the center late yesterday afternoon, a Dumpster sat, full. Inside, about 75 children played and studied in three rooms, while the fourth - where a sofa, a library and a video game console stood just a few months ago - was packed with moving boxes.

Huntington town officials, along with a host of politicians, have pledged to save the center. But I didn't see any of them yesterday when two sheriff's deputies, as polite as they were gentle, stopped by to see how the packing was going.

And I didn't see any of them talking to the neighborhood children later in the day, either.

"We've got an extension to April 24," Delores Thompson, the center's director, said.

"Nobody told us," one deputy said. "We could move you out today."

Thompson, surprised, said she didn't know and that she would make some calls.

Meanwhile, the center has no place to store its belongings; its children have no new home.

But they didn't know that yesterday:

"[The people at the club] show respect for me."

"When my mom lost her baby, this club was there for me and times when I felt like giving up, this club pulled me through."