A grant funding loss that hit more than a dozen Boys and Girls Clubs across the state has ended an on-site after-school program at Bloomington Junior High School [BJHS] and stunted plans to expand that programming to Bloomington High School.
After a decade at BJHS, after-school programming facilitated by the Bloomington-Normal Boys and Girls Club has relocated to its clubhouse — right as the club is at capacity.
Now, instead of remaining on the District 87 campus, students who need a place to go at the end of the school day will have to be bussed to the clubhouse on 1615 Illinois Street, a logistical pivot that won’t be without some initial challenge, CEO Tony Morstatter said.
“We have great relationships, great collaborative partnerships with the schools, with our busing, but they’re going to have to reroute some kids. There is transportation from all of our schools to Sunnyside Park, which is where our clubhouse is, but it’s a matter of making sure they have room for those youth on those buses,” Morstatter said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
In some cases, students who participated in both an extracurricular and the after-school programming offered by the Club may have to choose between one or the other, given the program’s pivot to Illinois Street.
Called a 21st Century Community Learning Center, the program offered a structured environment and a hot meal to kids who needed a place to stay at the end of the school day. Programming included academic support, social-emotional development, sports, arts and STEM. At its conclusion, the Boys and Girls Club provided transportation home from the school site.
BJHS is one of 15 such centers forced to either close or pivot operations after some 21st Century Community Learning Center grants were not awarded this year, according to the Illinois Alliance of Boys and Girls Clubs, an advocacy group for member clubs across the state.
The funding loss totals $1.45 million, an Alliance press release said. In Bloomington, Morstatter said the loss was $300,000 over a period of three years, which would have supported both the junior high and planned high school locations.
“It almost feels like — not to make any assumptions here — but like an attack on the Boys and Girls Clubs and the services that we provide,” said Alliance CEO and Executive Director Awisi Bustos. “We’re not just numbers on a piece of paper. This is actually resources and names and families and jobs in communities that will be impacted adversely. What we’re going through right now is definitely not an acceptable result by any means.”
The federal Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Center program was established in 2000 and it’s the only source of federal funding that goes solely to educational programming outside of normal school hours — whether before or after the school day or in the summer.
Managed by the Illinois State Board of Education [ISBE], Bustos said the past grant cycle left member clubs and the Alliance, which applies for funding on behalf of some clubs, “scrambling and confused.”
“On the one end, it was communicated to us by ISBE that there wouldn’t be any funding and then there was a grant that was released pretty much out of nowhere and we all scrambled to apply for it because we really do need this vital funding,” she said. “In addition to that, the mechanisms or the avenues with which we applied historically were different.”
In a statement to WGLT, ISBE said the site at Bloomington Junior High School wouldn’t have been eligible for renewal anyway, since it had already had two, five-year grant cycles and the agency is “prohibited from renewing a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant more than once.”
The statement also noted that the previous cycle was “a competition for new grants, not an opportunity for renewal.”
“As diplomatically as I can possibly say: A renewal and a new grant is semantics. You can say this was a renewal that expired. I can give you that,” Bustos said. “To present a new grant, knowing that there’s something that is expiring, and then to let us know after the fact that, ‘Oh this wasn’t going to save these sites’ but is for whatever you’re saying it is, now — I think it’s very confusing.”
ISBE maintains that it notified grantees in April 2023 that their funding conclusion was around the corner and that, while clubs applied for more than $34.5 million, it only had $10 million to award for the current fiscal year.
The agency decided to prioritize “novice grantees,” or clubs that had not had a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant since 2014, “in order to increase access in underserved areas.”
Either way, the loss hits hard.
“You have team members in various clubs who have dedicated their lives to ensuring that the youth they serve have the resources they need. [They are] having to look in the faces of their kids and tell them, ‘You’re not going to be able to come here anymore,’” Bustos said. “You have parents that are reaching out to CEOs directly, expressing how this is going to put a hardship on their families and kids.”
A northern Illinois club based in Freeport has already pivoted to an all-volunteer staff to cut costs.
In Bloomington, moving the junior high school site and new high school kids to the Boys and Girls Clubhouse — where there were already some 85 kids on a waiting list — comes at a challenging time: Already “at capacity,” a fundraising effort to build a new, larger building is still millions away from hitting its goal.
“I think looking at 21st Century Funding to support a future club or services at Bloomington Junior High may be difficult. Our long-term vision is really focused on bringing youth from the east, west, north and from our entire community together in one space,” Morstatter said. “We’ve been working on a comprehensive campaign to build a new Boys and Girls Club where we could serve over 500 kids on an average day. That effort, that vision has taken more time than what we would like, but eventually we’ll have that new building and the… junior high [and] high school students in our community will have a place to call home.”
The Bloomington-Normal Boys and Girls Club also facilitates a 21st Century Community Learning Center at Parkside Junior High School in Unit 5. That location's current grant is not set to end until 2026, ISBE said.
