Daniel Rodriguez hit the Ping-Pong ball back and forth, smiling at the girl across the table. This was a new game for him, he said. His game used to be the streets.
Rodriguez said the Seneca Beacons Program at Intermediate School 74 on Bryant Avenue has given him something better to do than hang out. When the ninth-grader leaves Stevenson High School every day, he goes directly to the Beacon and often stays until it closes at 9 p.m.
"It changed me upside down," Rodriguez said.
The Beacons Program is the apparent golden child of the Department of Youth Services, the only program to emerge unscathed from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's proposed budget cuts to the agency. Giuliani's preliminary spending plan calls for halving the agency's budget to $20 million. The majority of that would go to the Beacons.
"They have become the cornerstone of our youth services system," said Alfred B. Curtis Jr., the youth commissioner.
Begun five years ago at 10 sites, it has now grown to 37 programs, with at least one in each school district. Each site will continue to receive $450,000, said a department official.
But other programs will not fare as well. In fact, the reductions, if implemented, are expected to mean the elimination of at least 100 other youth services-funded programs in the borough, said Linda Loeb, of the Borough President's Bureau of Management and Budget.
Officials in some youth programs dotting the borough are reluctant to comment publicly on the decision to select Beacons over all others, but even borough officials outside the youth services circle wonder why the mayor has focused only on Beacons.
"It is difficult to determine why one would be selected over another and why organizations would be pitted against each other," Loeb said.
At budget hearings four weeks ago, the borough president's office asked Curtis to compile a formal evaluation of the Beacons. No deadline was set for the report.
Directors at the Seneca Beacon say they believe they won the mayor's affection because they are responsive and efficient.
When the Seneca Beacon began three years ago, for example, co-director Sonia Mounier-Sanchez went door-to-door in Hunts Point, asking residents age 6 and up what they wanted in a community center. In response, the Beacon provides free computer and martial arts classes, tutoring in English and Spanish, ceramics classes, preventive services for substance abuse and domestic violence, and athletic teams from track to basketball.
Program officials say they continually survey community members, and try to meet those needs creatively. Rodriguez, who uses the Beacon's tutoring program to prepare for art school, is one of the resources they can tap.
The directors recently appointed him and the Beacon's other art enthusiasts to teach younger children at day camp this summer.
"It builds up their self-esteem, gives them practice and helps the younger kids," said David Reznik, co-director of the Seneca program.