YMCA program Kids Boomerang looking for a permanent home

You wouldn’t know it from the name, but employees at the Boomerang program don’t want to see the kids they serve again.

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA’s Boomerang program provides an alternative space for suspended students to complete work and receive counseling, but it needs to find a new home for itself.

Boomerang is a collaboration between Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA . With this program, Orange County middle and high school students who would typically be suspended from school for three to 10 days instead attend the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA at Meadowmont.

Students in the program used to attend the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA location at 980 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd . This fall, due to that YMCA’s renovations , the program is held at the YMCA at Meadowmont location at 301 Old Barn Lane .

Tami Pfeifer, Boomerang program director , said the program’s former location was convenient for most students to attend and the Meadowmont site has posed new challenges. Students whose parents cannot provide transportation must rely on complicated or irregular bus routes.

“That’s been a little trickier,” Pfeifer said. “We’ve served families who lived out in Cedar Grove , and it took them an hour to get here.”

Chapel Hill resident Danielle Benjamin’s son had to take three different buses to attend Boomerang. She said the process took about an hour and a half.

The YMCA at Meadowmont is only a temporary location for Boomerang, but it can’t go back to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, either — there won’t be space once the renovations are completed. Pfeifer is looking for a new home for the program, but she said it has been a challenge.

“We get most of our funding from the school system, and they’ve been supportive, but definitely in Chapel Hill they struggle with space on their own, so it’s not like they can say, ‘Oh, just come right here,’” Pfeifer said.

“It’s about money — we can’t find a place that we can live unless we have a lot of money. So that’s something we’re working on and want to get support from people in the community, for ideas, because we want to continue to provide service.”

Carrboro resident Bernadette Albritton’s son attended Boomerang after being suspended from school. She said the Meadowmont location is isolated and difficult to reach for those students who depend on buses, but transportation was not an issue for her son.

“Boomerang had a great positive impact on my child,” she said in an email.

“He was encouraged to reflect on the behavior that got him into trouble and identify his strengths and use of them to move forward and not repeat the negative behavior.”

Benjamin’s son was recommended to attend Boomerang for five days after he hit another student who had hit him first. Benjamin said the counseling he received at the program informed him of alternative options when faced with that kind of situation.

“It’s an excellent opportunity for first offenders,” she said. “It gives them something to do next. It provided better insight than him sitting at home sulking about it.”

Albritton and Benjamin both said the program is positive for the district.

“It gives structure to a time that would otherwise be unproductive for one of the most vulnerable populations of students,” Albritton said.

Pfeifer said Boomerang interrupts the school-to-prison pipeline by keeping students with disciplinary issues on track for graduation.

Experts define the school-to-prison pipeline as a nationwide trend where students are suspended or expelled from school or shuttled into criminal justice programs for minor offenses. Research shows these types of punishments largely target minorities and those with learning disabilities.

At Boomerang, students complete the day’s schoolwork and receive class credit, as well as extra counseling services. This system helps to resolve problems while allowing them to keep up in their classes, Pfeifer said.

“The whole idea is that when kids get suspended, they’re usually going to be unsupervised because a lot of parents work,” Pfeifer said. “We wanted a positive, supervised place for them to be able to attend.”

John Williams , the principal at Phoenix Academy High School in Chapel Hill , said he values the program.

“It’s another one of those resources I try to use to make sure they’re not out of school every time they mess up,” Williams said.

Williams said alternative discipline programs like Boomerang contribute to higher minority graduation rates in the district.

Gloria Sanchez-Lane , a Phoenix Academy social worker who previously worked at Chapel Hill High School , said Boomerang is a good example of creative discipline and gives students the one-on-one interaction they need.

“Our kids continue to get an education while they’re not with us,” she said.

city@dailytarheel.com