Staff file photo by Tim Barber/Chattanooga Times Free Press - Adult residents exercise in the gym as part of the Health and Wellness Program at the Avondale Recreation Center.It is long past time to invest in our young people.
And not just in schools.
So Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke struck a good note Thursday when he announced he is willing to put $6 million toward building a brand new, bigger and better Avondale Youth and Family Development Center.
The current Avondale center at the corner of Wilcox Boulevard and Dodson Avenue has an attractive playground and front facade, but from there, things at the four-room recreation center go downhill quickly. It was built in 1949, and its last major renovation was in 2002. Fitting the 60 to 80 people who use the center daily to exercise, play, learn and socialize requires mustering basketball players outside on many days so seniors can have the floor for stretching.
On the city's youth and family development centers website, Avondale boasts a reading room with the free LEXIA program, a community room, a computer lab, a game room, a full kitchen and a gym, as well as a playground, two youth baseball fields, an adult baseball field, two tennis courts and indoor/outdoor basketball courts. Clearly, some of those activity spaces would best be described as corners rather than rooms.
The mayor said Thursday he wants to double the center's space. Perhaps quadrupling it might be more in order. But neighborhood leaders are happy to see the center finally getting any attention, and they say they see opportunities opening up.
"I tell you we are in a zone now where we, as a community, will have to take a greater role in how our community functions and how we raise our kids. I am excited that we will have a facility that will allow us to do a greater job of that," Avondale Neighborhood Association President James Moreland told Times Free Press reporter Paul Leach.
The mayor's announcement came two days after a fiery speech by Kevin Muhammad on behalf of a coalition of concerned citizen groups that called for alternatives like youth development to the mayor's plan to spend $1 million on public safety cameras over the next two years. Muhammad, speaking to the City Council in a "People's State of the City" address, was highly critical of the city's handling of gang violence and its investment - or the dearth of it - in the city's "poor and disenfranchised."
But the mayor said Thursday the Avondale center's replacement has been under discussion for about a year. He says the plan, which is to be presented to the council on May 17, calls for a larger gymnasium with bleachers, a computer lab, multiple classrooms, and a library and reading lab. Outdoor renovations will include improved basketball courts and larger softball fields.
But policing and security also seem to be drivers of the maintenance and renovations in many of the city's recreation and development centers.
In mid-April, the Times Free Press carried a story reporting that several Chattanooga Youth and Family Development Centers are on track to receive a mix of security cameras, improved lighting and gym floor renovations. The story took note of a recent City Council strategic planning session when administrative finance officials discussed a program to roll out 360-degree rotating cameras and lighting upgrades for 15 of Youth and Family's 17 centers over a two-year period.
"It's critical that facial and other details are identifiable," said the city's Deputy Chief Operating Officer David Carmody last month. "Otherwise, they are useless."
The Carver Center, located on Orchard Knob Avenue, will be the first of six or seven centers to receive cameras in the first year of the program, Carmody said. A silver lining is that the centers also will receive better Internet connections - another key to the proper operation of cameras and security.
Meanwhile, gym floor makeovers for the Shepherd and Tyner centers are currently underway. Carver and Eastdale are scheduled to receive new flooring in May.
If policing gang violence is what it takes to get youth development centers improved in the city, so be it.
But let's make sure filming is not all that is accomplished in places that are intended to provide healthy learning and growing.