Program reaches out to children
Last Monday was the final session of the school year for the “After School Kids” program at Calvary United Methodist Church in Uniontown, but it wasn’t a time for goodbyes as far as program director Tina Whitehead was concerned. “I fill the car with drinks and cookies and go to them,” she said while her husband Tom, the pastor, was serving up a special meal – spaghetti and meatballs left over from a church dinner on Saturday.
The usual fare is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and snacks served by volunteers in the kitchen. The children play computer games, color, wrestle around on the furniture and, on some occasions, do homework.
“Homework is not their priority in life,” Whitehead said. “For the most part we’re just happy to get them off the street.”
The Whiteheads took a special liking to one kid – Michael Ellerbe. He showed up sporadically during the first two years of the program and then started attending regularly.
He lived near the Whiteheads and often visited them at their home. Tina said he was one of the few kids who liked to just sit and talk.
The 12-year-old boy’s highly publicized shooting death is leading to efforts to create programs for other at-risk kids living in Uniontown’s East End.
Recently, local officials discussed starting an after-school program at Jumonville. It was proposed that the church could still operate its program on Monday, with the children going to Jumonville the rest of the week.
Eventually, Whitehead would like to start a community center in Uniontown’s East End and bring the program there.
State police shot Ellerbe while fleeing from a stolen truck on Christmas Eve. Neither the Fayette County district attorney’s office, a coroner’s jury nor a state police internal investigation have found fault with the two troopers involved, who said the shooting was an accident.
A couple of the kids at the church on Monday were friends with Ellerbe and say they still think about him, but they wouldn’t divulge much about their relationship with him or what they think of the shooting.
Whitehead would like to see an old apartment building across the street, where Ellerbe and his family use once lived, converted into a community center bearing his name.
Whitehead said such as center could be used to run a larger program in hopes that it might stop anything like what happened to Ellerbe from happening again.
She doesn’t have a source for the money needed to restore the abandoned building, but she’s working on it.
Whitehead said that while the proposed after-school program at Jumonville could work, she’s afraid that the troubled youth of the East End would find such a program overwhelming and not join or drop out.
“The program itself is not important. You have to make a commitment to the kids,” Whitehead said. “I don’t know if this (program) does any good. Their grades don’t improve. That’s what scared me about grant programs. How do you measure improvement and what happens if they don’t.”