By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

After Mayor McGinn formally presents his budget plan with speeches at 11 and 2 pm today, it’s likely more than a few groups will start mobilizing to challenge parts of it.

One group of city-service users already has a two-week head start: Those who use city-run community centers that are facing major operational/staffing changes. The mayor came to West Seattle two weeks ago today (WSB coverage here) with City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, who chairs the Parks Committee, and acting Seattle Parks Superintendent Christopher Williams to preview that part of the plan, splitting centers into geographic groupings, each of which will retain one or two full-service centers, while the others see varying degrees of cutbacks/changes (all documented here).

Perhaps the most drastic of all is the plan proposed for West Seattle’s Southwest Community Center, which would no longer be a community center, but instead would be reclassified as a Teen Life Center – which is currently part of its operations. And part of its space would be transformed into a new Neighborhood Service Center for the city – replacing the one on Delridge, which would close (as reported here two weeks ago).

“All of us … are stunned” by the SWCC proposal, wrote the center’s Advisory Council president, Tom Foley, in a letter to the City Council. (Read his entire letter here.)

Among them – a group whose relationship with and use of Southwest Community Center would seem to embody what the city has said it’s seeking, partnerships with community members/groups that maximize use of a facility and bring in revenue.

This group is the Family Learning Program, serving more than 130 kids and their homeschooling families, which has seen major growth since it launched last winter, and was hoping to expand its program to more days – until this proposal put it under a cloud of doubt.

And it’s only one of the programs based at the center, serving customers diverse in everything from ethnicity to age, with regular programs and special events including the annual luau presented by the local Pacific Islander community:

(Photo courtesy Tom Foley)

A member of the Family Learning Program’s steering committee, Kathleen Lonergan, was first to let us know about the Save Southwest Community Center campaign. She invited WSB to come visit the program participants on the day when they hold most of their programs and classes at SWCC, so we stopped in last Friday to talk and tour.

That’s a creative-writing class, part of a wide curriculum that supplements what the families are teaching at home. They pay for their use of the community center, registering for classes through its registration system, but partnering with community-center staff, who hires the class teachers – scouted by the Family Learning Program. That staff, said Kathleen, would no longer be part of the center’s operations if it is changed to a Teen Life Center and Department of Neighborhoods facility, and that’s part of why their program would no longer be able to use the facility.

On Wednesdays and Fridays, they use the lower level of the center, where they have access to four classrooms. If they had to move to another center, Kathleen says, they wouldn’t have more than two, which would limit the size of the program. This one also enables participants to keep an eye on the outdoor play area, through the large windows in the hallway connecting the lower rooms:

In the hallway on Friday, we met 6 1/2-year-old Sadie, who has just launched a food drive, and proudly posed with the collected donations from the first week:

She’s hoping to do it every week, her mom told us. But now, they’re wondering how many more weeks they will have at Southwest Community Center, if the current plan becomes reality.

Kathleen says the Family Learning Program had been hoping to expand to three days a week, since it’s been such a hit. (Even as we spoke to her, a new participant wandered in and asked for help navigating the classroom array.) She has three children who participate, and the offerings are wide-ranging, including Latin, playwriting, math with manipulatives, science with herbs, which was under way in the SWCC kitchen during our visit:

One of the hallmarks of the program is that students are grouped more by interest than by age – one class might have kids ranging from 6 to 11 years old, another from 9 years old on up. That’s one reason why families choose to homeschool – so that their children can learn and explore beyond what is assigned to their own narrow age range. Yet another class under way Friday morning led a group through creative-writing exercises:

Because of the budget proposal, the program’s families suddenly find themselves doing a different kind of writing – to the mayor and city councilmembers. They know times are tough. But they also point out that this program is bringing money to the city, with one of those partnerships that has been spoken about so often.

Program leaders say that besides the number of classrooms available, there’s other reasons why Southwest has been perfect for this program – like the synergy of having the swimming pool next door; Family Learning Program participants take swimming lessons, too. (The pool is not proposed for closure, city leaders stressed in the announcement two weeks ago.)

The computer room, where program students take math classes, is yet another multiple-use area – there are other computer classes on the SWCC schedule, including this one for senior citizens:

(Photo courtesy Tom Foley)
The proposal for changing Southwest was discussed briefly at last Thursday night’s Parks Board meeting by Parks budget director Carol Everson. She told the board that the Teen Life Center transformation made sense because of the natural constituencies from Chief Sealth International High School and Denny International Middle School virtually across the street.

She also acknowledged that some of the city’s initial savings from reducing the center’s operations would be erased by the cost of relocating the Neighborhood Service Center from Delridge and setting it up in the SWCC building.

At the Parks Board meeting, one commissioner asked about perceptions that the data the city used to guide its decisions did not treat one North End facility fairly. The same contention is contained in the Southwest CC Advisory Council president’s letter – in this case, Tom Foley says SWCC’s “proposed changes represent an underinformed decision based on old data and we are asking for a more balanced approach. Southwest Community Center in the past decade has been beset by extensive closures for remodeling and maintence that has significantly impacted our customer base. In recent years we have rebounded significantly to become a vibrant hub of activity for our culturally diverse community.” (In fact, SWCC has just started another maintenance closure today, according to its website.)

But Everson told the Parks Board on Thursday that “I’m not claiming (the process) was perfectly fair. There’s no community center in our system that fits in a box.”

Will Southwest – or any of the other centers facing major changes, including Alki, which went to “limited use” last year and may see its hours reduced further – succeed in getting the city to change its mind? The process starts today. Kathleen from the Family Learning Program says they are preparing for a big turnout at the first City Council budget public hearing, one week from tomorrow (October 4th). You can track hearings, documents, next steps through this page – and we’ll continue to cover the budget’s West Seattle proposals/effects too.