St. Louis BWorks has worked with many partners over the past couple of years alone, including, for the first time ever, the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation. In the last year and a half, the BWorks education team prepared four different six-week-long Earn-A-Bike cohorts at City-owned-and-operated rec centers, with multiple BWorks teachers committing time, energy and talents to these efforts.
However, in every case, the City did not adequately hold up its end of the contract, which BWorks has now canceled as we move on to other class offerings to fill the gaps and make the most of our capacity to meet ongoing demand for our Earn-A-Bike, Learn-To-Ride and Earn-A-Computer offerings.
We’ve begun moving students who were scheduled to complete Earn-A-Bike at one local rec center earlier this month to other cohorts at other locations, and any families affected who still are in search of a solution may contact our programs director at evie@bworks.org.
The most frustrating and frequent issue, including with the most recent cohort, is that often there has been no one on site at a given City rec center to open the building for our teachers, students and families. This is despite multiple site visits and in-person conversations, and many phone calls and emails in advance to the department to ensure all are on the same page. It’s unfortunate and unfair that these facilities can’t be opened on time, as agreed, when families are waiting outside for programs. We won’t ask local children to have class on the sidewalk any more than we already have due to these situations.
We’ve also had the City leave us in the lurch, days away from a planned six-week course at one of the rec centers, with a staffer texting us that routine maintenance on the building would leave the facility unavailable during the class. BWorks scrambled and secured an alternative location for the group in that case, knowing these families had blocked out six weeks of time once a week to commit to the class, and wanting to do right by them despite the failure on the City’s part.
On top of all of this, we have been told we must not recruit to fill these classes, that the programs are for “OUR kids.” We are still lost on what these comments, received by BWorks team members from several different people within the city parks department, are about. Are programs only for kids already involved at recreation centers? Is there no value in getting new local kids at these centers in their neighborhoods?
In every case, we abided by the department’s insistence that we not try to recruit kids in our shared community ourselves, but predictably, classes were not filling up, because of an outdated, overly complicated registration system families were forced to use (RecDesk). And so a week or so out from each course launch, knowing BWorks has many folks on waitlists for our classes at our headquarters and other partner locations, we would hustle to start making calls and emails to fill empty spots (which is why three of the four cohorts still ended up with a significant number of students). But this has been totally unmanageable as a system for registering students for a multi-week commitment.
The parks department seems unwilling to grapple with the need for programming providers to have information about registrants and key contact info for their caregivers, and the need for both BWorks and families to be in communication about plans well in advance.
We shared these concerns with elected officials, including the City committee, early last week, and have yet to receive any meaningful response to our expressed concerns or requests for help on next steps. BWorks is asking that City-based funding for recreation not be tied solely to the recreation centers, and that funding for programs be available for use in any of our amazing community parks instead. Removing this barrier would allow groups such as ours to act independently and deliver the programs we are good at, while removing the unnecessary roadblocks to our own residents.
We share this unfortunate situation not out of any sort of spite but truly because St. Louisans deserve consistently accessible, welcoming rec centers. St. Louis residents deserve, and could have, better. BWorks deserves better too, in exchange for a lot of hard work that went into these four cohorts – four of more than 100 groups of children and teens we have served in the past year and a half.
