New Haven Independent

Extended hours will “give kids something to do if they get bored, and keep them off the streets,” said teen tour guide Jebrell Brooks (pictured), after diving into the pool for the finale of a tour through the Howe Street facility.

Brooks (pictured), a rising freshman at Career High School, is one of about 900 city teens employed this summer through the city’s Youth at Work initiative. He, like many of his friends in the Dwight neighborhood, has been going to the YMCA at 52 Howe St. for years. He led a tour through the action-packed rooms Thursday morning after city leaders announced the good news.

The city will pay to keep the YMCA open longer, making it the fourth site in the $100,000 Open Schools Initiative. Starting next Monday, doors will be open until 8 p.m. (instead of 5:30 p.m.), giving the 12 to 18 year-old crowd an alternative to roaming the streets on bikes. Teens just have to sign in at the door and can do various activities for free — such as play basketball in one of two gymnasiums.

Or play pool or ping pong in this game room. (Younger kids won’t be around — evenings, from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., will be teen time.) The rest of the day, the facility already bustles with youth programs.

The city’s Open Schools initiative, new this year, offers kids aged 12 to 18 free activities — martial arts, swimming, dancing, arts and crafts — “a positive alternative to the streets,” in the words of Aldermanic President Carl Goldfield (pictured below, announcing the news outside the YMCA).

The three open schools, John Martinez, King-Robinson, and Career High School, are open from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, until Aug. 11. So far, about 600 kids have already come through the schools for summer fun.

With the three schools open, the city realized kids in Dwight were being left out. Kids weren’t going to risk getting beaten up by crossing onto Hill or Fair Haven turf to play basketball or swim. They needed somewhere closer. “We were concerned that we didn’t have anyone in the Dwight neighborhood,” said Karen Dubois-Walton, the mayor’s chief of staff. And, she noted, the two schools with a pool were getting the most traffic. So the YMCA made sense.

Terry McCarthy, director of the YMCA, said she knows a lot of “regulars” will stay on into the evening now, instead of just leaving at 5:30 p.m.

The YMCA is a good choice, agreed Dwight activist Curlena McDonald, because you won’t have to persuade Dwight kids to go to a new place. “The kids know about this place and they know about Miss Terry. They’ve been doing this work for so long that it was really a good match.”