Frederica Freyberg:

Amid budget news and federal spending cuts, it can be easy to lose sight of real-life losses families are encountering in Wisconsin. With 57% of its residents living just above or at the poverty level, the small community of Nekoosa relies on programs like AmeriCorps and the 21st Century Community Learning Centers for things like food assistance and childcare. “Here & Now” reporter Aditi Debnath sat down with Tracy Vruwink, who oversees these programs, to talk about what these cuts mean for Nekoosa families.

Aditi Debnath:

You oversee the 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, which supports this Boys and Girls Club of Nekoosa program. Can you talk about what that support looks like in terms of what services you offer?

Tracy Vruwink:

Yeah. So after school or actually it’s before and after school. So we open at 6:30 in the morning until school starts. We do enrichment activities. We feed the kids, sometimes breakfast depending. A lot of kids come to school, you know, hungry. After school, they come. We do activities. They go outside. They go to the gym. We do homework help. We do career launch. We do snack. And again, there’s a lot of these kids that come in here and have snack, and then they don’t eat again until they come back in the morning. So which is very unfortunate. But we have, you know, food to provide them. And we help support the backpack program where the kids get to take home food for the week — weekend so that they have food to eat.

Aditi Debnath:

If the 21st Center Community Learning Center grant was taken away, what would that mean for your program?

Tracy Vruwink:

We would probably have to scale it back immensely, because the funding for this program is what helps the kids. And if we don’t have that funding, we’d have to find the funding from somewhere else, or the Boys and Girls Club would have to run it themselves. And I don’t believe we would be able to run a morning program at that point. It would be strictly afternoon. All the things that they do would be cut back because we wouldn’t have the funding to do that. So it would just — it would make a huge difference. We might be able to even take less kids, and that would be an enormous shock for the community.

Aditi Debnath:

What would that mean for the families who bring their kids here?

Tracy Vruwink:

It would be devastating for them. It truly would. Parents have to work, and a lot of parents can’t be home until, you know, after 6:00 at night. So without this program, those kids are going to have nowhere to go. And they need somewhere to go. And I think our programs, all after-school programs, help those kids to be able to feel like they’re safe and they’re cared for. They have food to eat, they’re learning. There’s no learning loss. They don’t have someone to help them, they’re not going to succeed. A lot of our families rely on us to cover the cost of child care, because the Boys and Girls Club, we can’t charge a fee here because of the grant. So that’s free childcare, which is saving families anywhere between $150 to $200 a week just for care for one child. Losing the after-school programs would exacerbate existing inequalities in access to education and opportunities, particularly for these kids, because 99% of them are low income. It would reduce community engagement. The kids come here and they just hang out. If they had to go home after school by themselves, they would probably be getting into trouble. When they’re here, we know they’re safe. We keep them out of trouble. They learn a lot of things.

Aditi Debnath:

In the ten years that you’ve been in this job, has it always been so uncertain?

Tracy Vruwink:

Never. We’ve gotten the CLC grant two five-year terms in a row now. So we’ve been fortunate that way but if this funding goes away, I really, honestly, don’t know what we’re going to do. Like I said, it would probably be on a smaller scale, but then we probably won’t be able to serve the 200 children that we serve now, because, you know, the funding just won’t be there to do that.

Aditi Debnath:

You also oversee the AmeriCorps program, which helps this community Nekoosa get food on their table. Can you talk about that program and how it came about?

Tracy Vruwink:

We were contacted by the Wisconsin Partnership Program, which is a WPP grant, and they offered for us to write a grant to get an AmeriCorps staff here in our district. So we did that. We got Nikki. She came in and it’s all about like the food insecurities. Nikki started a food pantry. So we went from servicing three families. We’re up to 21 families now. We have a couple of churches who do some fundraisers, and they donate money so that we can buy groceries to donate to the families. When AmeriCorps was cut out by the federal government cutting the funding, we had to stop doing that. We had nobody to do it. Well, then we found a different way to go around it. Nikki’s now employed by the YMCA, and she is able to run the food pantry through the Nekoosa School District because we are a partner with the district. So she’s still able to, you know, service those families.

Aditi Debnath:

And what did that mean for that, you know, week where Nikki was no longer your employee?

Tracy Vruwink:

She volunteered that week, basically, just so that we could keep the families eating.

Aditi Debnath:

Because without the food pantry, what would those families be experiencing?

Tracy Vruwink:

They would have to find a means to get to Wisconsin Rapids, to the food pantries there. A lot of them don’t have a means to get there. We don’t have a bus system here. It’s generally if they can get a ride or something like that.

Aditi Debnath:

A federal court actually reinstated the programing. Does that give you any relief?

Tracy Vruwink:

Not really. Who’s going to want to apply for a job that they’re not really sure if it’s going to keep going or not? You know, it’s — you need to have an income. You need to support your family, even though the AmeriCorps income is small, it’s still something. And you can’t just not have that, that income. I’ve been doing this grant for ten years. I’ve had an AmeriCorps staff every year at this school and at the elementary school. Some years, that staff is so beneficial to helping the kids. They help them with their homework. They help them with their reading. They’re like an extension of the teachers’ day because they’re there at the end of the school day, and then they’re working with them on their homework. It’s just — they’re so beneficial. I just honestly think that they’re important for every school to have. AmeriCorps is where it needs to be.