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Housed in the former Clear Lake Elementary School, which closed in June, the community center is already serving as a home base for nonprofits. Money for building repairs, including a leaky roof, is still needed.
On a Thursday afternoon in July, the classrooms of former Clear Lake Elementary School buzzed with the chatter of kids.
Erik French-Roberts, 9, Sterling Becker, 8, Miles Austin, 7, and Noah Ritchie, 9, huddled around a piece of printer paper, spouting off food items for their pretend hamburger restaurant, The Krabby Patty.
It was a stacked menu: crabs, fish, clams, water, root beer, 7UP and Fanta for starters. For dessert, the boys decided on “sea cream” (ice cream topped with fish bits, seaweed and kelp), whipped cream and s’mores.
The boys were four of 125 children the Boys & Girls Clubs of Emerald Valley serves daily at the new Clear Lake Community Center in the Bethel neighborhood.
While Clear Lake Elementary School officially closed June 12, the building was not quiet for long.
“Teachers moved out — we helped physically move out — about 30 years of classrooms, and within two, three days, we were opening a community center,” said Shelly Ivey, executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Emerald Valley.
The community center now is an event space and home to several nonprofits including the Eugene-Springfield NAACP, the Boys and Girls Club, Honoring Our New Ethnic Youth (H.O.N.E.Y.), Preschool Promise, Nurturely and Food for Lane County’s Bethel Food Pantry program.
The center was the result of months of planning with the goal of serving youth and historically underserved community members of the Bethel neighborhood. But it required pivoting after federal funds fell through.
A community center for Bethel
In the wake of the closing of Clear Lake Elementary School due to districtwide enrollment decline, Bethel School District superintendent Kraig Sproles had big plans for giving the building a second, fruitful life.
The district was poised to receive $4 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to transform Clear Lake Elementary School into a “community resilience hub” through a $20 million grant awarded to Lane County for emergency preparedness.
The money would have improved the building’s security, fixed the leaking roof, made the bathrooms compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act and purchased things like generators and cots. It would have also hired a director to oversee the building — and eventually the planned nonprofit that would operate at the site.
A group of Bethel community stakeholders planned for the building to be used both as a shelter during times of extreme heat, wildfires, ice storms and freezing temperatures and a community center during the rest of the year.
But the money never came. The EPA told Lane County the grant was terminated in May because the project used language that had been flagged by the Trump administration. The project was called the Lane Transformation for Resiliency Through Equity and Engagement. Lane County has pursued legal action against the EPA for its refusal to honor the contract to award the grant.
After the loss of the grant, Bethel School District decided to open a community center anyway, despite not having the funds to retrofit the building.
“When the funding was pulled, that didn’t change our vision and our drive to make this happen,” Sproles said. “That’s still there. And I’m confident that we will find funding as we move forward.”
Neighborhood needs
Ivey of the Boys & Girls Clubs is no stranger to the Bethel neighborhood. Her kids attend school there, and she’s seen the gaps in services that families face when looking for childcare and many other things.
“We don’t have the same services, we don’t have restaurants, we don’t have activities,” Ivey said. “So whenever kids are in this region, we’re having to usually bus them or transport them out.”
The Boys & Girls Clubs started operating as an out-of-school care provider in the Bethel School District in 2022 at Prairie Mountain School. They were able to serve only 60 children there and had a long waiting list. In their expanded space at the Clear Lake Community Center, they now have about 125 kids a day.
“Our mission is really to serve kids who need us most, and so when we were looking at different areas of town that needed services, Bethel really was a top contender, knowing that there’s a lot of (families where) both parents are working outside of the household,” Ivey said.
Clear Lake Community Center has also provided BIPOC-serving organization Honoring Our New Ethnic Youth, nicknamed H.O.N.E.Y., the space to expand.
Previously housed at the Black Cultural Initiative Center on Jefferson Street, the organization was “busting at the seams,” said Niyah Ross, executive director. This is the first summer that Ross has been able to provide a summer program for kids and teens that combines academic support with cultural education and enrichment activities, including African drumming, writing poetry and reading books focused on Black history.
“It’s so important for them to learn about where they’re from,” Ross said. “We have a focus on African culture enrichment this summer, and we want to include more multicultural enrichment. A lot of our kids are mixed with so many different things.”
Nurturely, an organization focused on BIPOC mothers and babies, will also be a service provider at Clear Lake Community Center.
An aging building
Ivey has quickly learned the quirks of the nearly 50-year-old building. While it does have air conditioning, it doesn’t cool it evenly.
“We found that the library is a cooler space,” Ivey said. “When you get into the classrooms, you feel that heat. You put 30 kids in the space, it gets a little sweaty and warm.”
The Boys & Girls Clubs subsidize the cost of child care through fundraising and grants. Families pay $40 per month per child for afterschool care, while the true cost of programming is about $400 per month per child.
The Boys & Girls Clubs will now apply for grants and try to raise funds to continue the renovation of the Clear Lake Community Center. Ivey is especially worried about ventilation with the looming threat of wildfire smoke in late summer.
“Fortunately, we’ve not seen that yet this summer, but come August, it will become an issue,” Ivey said.
The Bethel School District still owns the building and will for the foreseeable future, Sproles said. Without the EPA grant, however, the district doesn’t have the money to fix some of the structural problems, like the leaky roof.
“The building leaks like a sieve,” Sproles said. “If you come during a rainstorm, the amount of buckets in that building is embarrassing.”
The roof alone will cost between $1.2 million and $1.5 million.
The superintendent is confident that the funding will materialize, however. The community center is already serving hundreds of families, and filling a void in the Bethel neighborhood. He hopes people will see its importance.
“Resilience in a community starts with relationships with the person, the neighbor down the street,” Sproles said. “And to be able to nurture those relationships is something which I think in the long run is a really strong investment.”
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