SIDE STREETS: City to close "the soul of the neighborhood"

It’s a bleak Christmas season at Colorado Springs’ community centers.

Normally, at this time of year, folks at the centers would be focused only on arranging holiday programs for the seniors who eat hot meals there every day, scheduling visits by Santa for the low-income preschoolers and day-care kids they oversee and lining up movies and games for the grade-school kids and teens who drop in after school.

Not this year.

Instead, the centers’ directors are distracted from the joys of the holiday season by the grim reality they face: the centers are gasping their last breaths.

Unless a benefactor steps forward with $1.5 million, this will be the last year Santa visits. The centers will be boarded up when city funding runs out in March. The City Council gave the centers about $400,000 for 2010 — or what it costs to run one center for a year.

Already, the directors are slashing staff and programs at these centers: Deerfield Hills, Hillside, Stratton Meadows and the Westside.

The idea of them closing is shocking to folks like neighborhood organizer Doug Jones, a retired Marine, who has lived  in Deerfield Hills since 1979.

“The center is the soul of this neighborhood,” he said. “If we lose the center, it will be like losing your breath.

“It’s a pivot point to every function in the neighborhood. They have day care, reading programs for little kids, computers for them to learn on, games, the sprayground, the community garden.

“We need the center. We must have it.”

But Deerfield is doomed, like all the rest, absent a deep-pocketed donor or partner to help out.

Jody Derington, who runs the Deerfield center, can’t fathom the loss to the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

“It’s crazy to imagine we’ll be closed,” she said. “It would be a shame and a nightmare.”

She fears crime rates will soar as teens — who suddenly have nowhere to go — occupy their free time roaming the city. She fears school-age children will suffer, reverting to latch-key status and going home to empty houses each day. And she fears preschoolers will not get the care and nurturing they need because no low-cost alternatives exist for their day care.

It’s the same story in the other neighborhoods.

For years, I’ve witnessed up close all the good work these centers do. I used to play basketball regularly on my lunch hour at Hillside’s gym. My son volunteered for a summer at Deerfield Hill’s sprayground. I’ve spoken to neighborhood groups and attended community meetings at the centers.

These community centers are the living rooms of these neighborhoods.

Brian Kates, who runs the southside Meadows Park center, feels desperate.

“We don’t have much time,” Kates said. “We’re lowering expenses. Laying off staff. Cutting programs. Seeking volunteers. But we need help to survive.”

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Read more on my blog  at
 gazette.com/blogs/sidestreets