Another dispatch from the "Gardens"

By Robert Rogers
Staff Writer

SAN BERNARDINO -- Jermontay Beltoncq is a diamond in one of the city's roughest neighborhoods.

The 12-year-old runs faster than all but the fleetest adults. He sprints, flips, and vaults off his hands into mind-bending spins like a gymnast.

Self-taught.

His raw but quick mind picks up board games in a blink. But for all his prodigious talent, Belton's future is shrouded in the haze of poverty and gang culture into which he was born.

He's aggressive, and his salty language is already tailored to the streets. Belton stands at the razor's edge of his young life -- he can go either way.

It's children like Belton who Top Flight Education and Sports Organization, a nonprofit organization that serves youths in the Waterman Gardens housing projects, is contracted to provide after-school activities.

"We do what we can with what we have," said Jason Williams, 23, a part-time manager for Top Flight who runs the Waterman Gardens Community Center. "These kids need us."

Waterman Gardens is a 252-unit subsidized housing project which has always been poor. In recent years, it has been marred by violence.

On June 24, 2006, a 16-year-old boy was shot and killed on his mother's porch in a dispute over a cell phone. On April 12 2007, a 15-year-old boy was brazenly shot in the head and killed on Waterman Avenue.

Both crimes - and boys - are well-remembered by kids here.

Within this grim milieu, nonprofits like Top Flight represent the only safe, constructive community outlet for children whose parents often have not the time nor means to provide much more than food, shelter and clothing.

And they do the job on the cheap.

Top Flight's contract with the County Housing Authority provides about $53,000 annually, most of which goes to part-time, $8-per-hour employees to monitor the center four hours per day. Two other nonprofits, Young Visionaries Youth Leadership Academy and the Bobby G. Vega Foundations, have contracts splitting the remaining $37,000 to provide services.

All totaled, funds stand at about $90,000 annually for youth programs, a figure even the Housing Authority itself admits is undesirably low.

And the funds haven't grown with the times.

"There is not much funding for youth programs compared to past years," said Alison Crawfordcq, a County Housing Authority spokeswoman.

Crawford said the Housing Authority hopes the future brings more resources from the federal government and from private sector partners, but says the challenges in recent years have diminished the amount and effectiveness of their youth programs.

In the past five years, the funding the Housing Authority receives vis-a-vis the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been on the steady decline, Crawford said.

"We used to have basketball, baseball and football leagues," Crawford said. "However, due to expenses for transportation, finding facilities and coaches it became too costly."
Will Graycq, Top Flight's executive director and himself a former child of urban poverty in South Central Los Angeles, bemoaned the loss of sports programming.

Top Flight and the Housing Authority first partnered in 1999 with the intention of running all-ages youth sports leagues. Meanwhile, Top Flight would run after-school programs in the Waterman Gardens Community Center and Johnson Hall on the West side.

But funding for the sports league dried up by 2004, Gray said, leaving him enough to run the center for four hours per day, and only for children up to age 13.

The other two nonprofits in the gardens focus on older children and offer computer and conservation training.

"With sports, you can change kids, give them something to strive for, build cameraderie," Gray said. "We are losing too many kids on these streets, and part of it is our failure as a society."

But not all is lost, not by a long shot. On a recent afternoon, Belton and about 20 others, a band of scrappy kids like 13-year-olds Cortez Porter (he excels at ping pong) and E.J. Green (rarely without his skateboard) took to the field to play a disorganized game of football under Williams' watchful eye.

Belton dominated, as usual, but something happened that was slightly different. When Porter asked for the ball, the typically dismissive Belton paused, then flipped it to the smaller boy.

"I promised his family we'd look after (Belton)," Williams said, smiling.