Army funding Judson after-school programs
23.02.12
Initially, Kirby Middle School sixth-grader Michael Espinoza studiously avoided the after-school program run by the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Antonio. He didn't think it was “legit.”
Then he heard about the game room with its pingpong and pool tables and big-screen videogame stations, the computer lab with 16 workstations, even the study room where he could get help doing homework. He realized the program, funded by the U.S. Army , was not only legit, it was “cool,” too.
“I came and checked it out,” he says. “And I decided, I could come here.”
That's the kind of attitude change Monte Riley had been hoping for ever since the Boys and Girls Clubs opened at Kirby and six other Judson schools in October.
“When they're in middle school or high school, kids don't have to come here,” says Riley, who oversees the Judson programs. “So we have to make it good enough that they want to.”
The Boys and Girls Clubs of San Antonio already serve 7,400 members. What makes the Judson clubs unusual is they're funded by a U.S. Army program called Army Youth Programs in Your Neighborhood, which — this being the military — goes by the acronym AYPYN, pronounced “ay-pin.”
Source: San Antonio Express