In Bowling Green, Ky., the Housing Authority has set up three learning centers, places where students can come for free after school. The Bryant Way Learning Center is where this story is focused. The center is ran by paid supervisors and volunteers, who usually arrive before the children. During the hours at the center, the children are expected to study, read, or do homework in silence. They do have a snack-time break, and many of the children at the center stay until after 6:30pm when their parents come to pick them up. I found this story while I was shooting an assignment at the center. It struck me as unique, mostly because the program is free of charge. After getting the children used to having the camera around, I spent about three days a week at the center. By the end, the supervisors would ask me to answer questions for the high schoolers if they didn't know the answer. As I became more comfortable with the center, the center seemed to become more comfortable with me. I tried, in this story, to show the center's several facets through frames of behavior unique to the center, through frames of casual fun, and through frames of special attention. This photo essay attempts to capture all of the center, not just the bad or the good.
James Ray, a sixth grader, attends the center with his two brothers.
Their mother raises all three in an apartment near the center; their father
has no contact with them.
Rekita Powell, a supervisor, helps Martez Dowlsen with his spelling homework.
Dowlsen, a second grader, also comes from a single-parent household.
"Many of these students all their time with children that are in similar
situations to their own," Powell says. "Most come from divorced
families and many come from underprivledged households . . . the best
I can do is keep them off the streets."
"Stop, drop, ka-boom, and baby rub your nipples...," Cierra Potter and
Justice Martin sing as they dance with their friends outside the center.
Potter, a fourth grader, and Martin, a third grader, arrive at Bryant
Way by bus like the other students. They talk and hang out before
the center to opens. "We all love Ludacris and 50 cent," Potter
says.
Third-grader, Diamond Marshall, says that she loves sports and school.
She's on a basketball team and does some of her work on a fourth-grade
level. She draws her favorite basketball player, Michale Jordan,
on the dry erase board at the center.
Most of the children go to school with at least one other student at the
center, so many times Rekita Powell and other supervisors try to get the
students together to explain problems they are all having. Jordan
Anthony, Tkeyan Chapman, and Diamond Marshall (left to right) have Powell
help them with a math problem.
The room with younger students usually has two supervisors for the five to eight children that attend the center on and off. For the last hour they are there, they usually play a game. Breanna Hill and Catrina Cooksey (left to right) play bingo while Chuartez Brown sits by himself because he got in trouble for talking. The punishments at the center include being separated from the group or not being allowed to have anything at snack time.
The center has been painted with murals. Cows, snakes, elephants,
and other animals cover all the walls. Catrina Cooksey, a second
grader, trys to get the attention of one of the supervisors.
During snack time, the children are allowed to play around more than usual. Chuartez Brown does the splits while fellow classmates Tianna Poole and Dayton Lightfoot (left to right) look on. "You're going to split your pants," says Leatrice Smith, a Western Kentucky University student and single mother, who volunteers at the center. "They're laughing with you now," she says. "But once it happens they'll be laughing at you."
Jordan Anthony sits next to the dry erase board, where one of the supervisors
from the younger room writes a message to the older students everyday.
