Gladys Aponte lives less than a mile west of Revere Park. So it’s easy for her to swing by there and pick up her daughters, ages 11 and 7, on the way home from her data entry job downtown.
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Last year Aponte chose the Neighborhood Boys & Girls Club program because it would be free: she qualifies for help from Child Care Assistance, a program funded by the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Child Care Assistance pays for the club program but not Park Kids. But she soon learned that her daughters were going to have a hard time getting there. Although buses take students from their school, Walt Disney Magnet School in Uptown, to Revere Park every afternoon, school officials wouldn’t let Aponte’s daughters ride those buses because they weren’t enrolled in Park Kids.
Amanda Fox, who runs the Neighborhood Boys & Girls Club, says she’s seen parents encounter this kind of problem before. “There are only a handful of sites that the public schools will drop kids off at and they have to be a Park District with a Park Kids program,” she says. The Chicago Public Schools shouldn’t make an exclusive arrangement with the Park District, she adds, “when the goal is to keep kids off the street and give them something productive to do and give them a safe place where they can spend time with friends and not be alone at home.”
“We’re trying to be flexible,” Vaughn said, extending an invitation—through the Reader—for frustrated Disney parents to call him at the CPS press office for help sorting out similar problems.
