Challenge for parents

For parents coping with the unique challenges of urban child-rearing, it can be hard to imagine summer without public programs.

“In New York City, it’s not like we can open our doors and all of our kids can run out and play,” Manhattan resident Tracy Ranson said while keeping an eye on her 2-year-old son at a crowded playground. “You need some kind of program for these kids.”

Nearby, Joe Exley recalled how the city’s libraries and their daily reading programs had helped inspire his daughter Fiona’s love of books. After seeing his daughter, now almost 4, experience the programs with a diverse range of New York City children, Exley said that the idea of further cutbacks was frustrating.

“Any social programs dealing with kids seem like the last things that should be cut,” he said.

At city-funded summer camps in Washington, D.C., kids kick soccer balls and team up for rugby games in between academic enrichment activities. This year, money for the camps disappeared entirely due to budget woes, but the non-profit DC Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation was able to find $1 million in unused funds to keep about half of last year’s 3,000 camper slots open, said Natasha Marshall, grants manager for the trust. Specialized camps for Asian-American children and students in foster care are among those that lost their city funds.

In Detroit, budget makers managed to stave off further recreation cutbacks this year, holding services at the already reduced level they’d been cut to in the fall of 2009. That’s when the struggling city’s recreation centers began shutting down two days a week and cutting back to eight hours a day — down from 12 to 14 hours, said Alicia Minter, director of the Detroit Recreation Department. Half the city-sponsored summer camps were shuttered.

Still, shortfalls in other areas have those who work with children bracing for change in Detroit.

At the volunteer-run Summer in the City camp program, co-founder Ben Falik is readying for the possibility that the camp may need to set up in the park if the school that usually partners with the program shuts down due to cutbacks. And thousands fewer youngsters will have government-funded summer jobs in the city, because of cuts that have returned work force investment funding to the level it was at in 1990.

All over, many libraries say they are reducing hours, laying off staff and in some cases running out of money for new books, although there’s no way to tell exactly how many children’s summer programs have been cut. Without summer-time academic activities, educators say children already on the edge can fall further behind come September.

In Oakland, Calif., where municipal leaders are considering a budget that would shutter 14 of 18 library branches, librarians are trying to fight back with “story time flash mobs” in which they grab bullhorns and read aloud in public to draw attention to the funding threat.

“We’re really trying to advocate for story time as an activity. It helps students who are not yet reading — or even talking — in their literacy ability. This is not some nice thing we can pick back up when the economy is better,” librarian Amy Martin said.