A new direction, a narrowed focus, a smaller space

The Baldwin Council Against Drug Abuse, a 40-year-old agency that was defunded last summer, has come back to life in a swiftly revamped supply closet at the offices of the Baldwin School District. Holed up beside the comparatively sprawling Buildings and Grounds headquarters, the BCADA is vastly changed from the reliable, if shoestring, operation that aided the people of Baldwin in battling substance abuse for nearly half a century.

“Well, I’m a one-woman show now,” said Claudia Rotundo, the director of the BCADA for 17 years and now its sole full-time employee. “It’s me and a bookkeeper who comes in once a month.”

In order to keep her program afloat in a turbulent economy, Rotundo was forced to downsize. First, she laid off staff. Then she gave up the rooms the BCADA had occupied for many years. She cut loose her interns, her desks and phones — even the files her office kept on its clients. “When our funding was taken away, we basically ceased to exist,” Rotundo said. “It took us about two months to disassemble 40 years of agency because we couldn’t just throw those personal records into any old dumpster.”

But although the agency she joined as a secretary in 1986 had been nearly demolished as far as Nassau County and New York State were concerned, the light had not quite gone out in Rotundo’s heart. Her budgets for treatment programs and staff had dried up, but she still had the 26 percent of her original funding earmarked for substance-abuse prevention. With this small amount of money, she thought she could keep her agency on life support.

“I went to the Baldwin School District and I said, ‘Look, I don’t have the funding to both pay rent and run a program,’” Rotundo recalled. “‘But if you give me a little space, I can run an evidenced based prevention program that will focus on the schools.’”

To think of the Baldwin School District as a fund drenched organization capable of great largess would bring a wry smile to the face of many residents, but the district saw the proposition as an opportunity. It offered Rotundo the use of a repurposed supply closet in exchange for her promise to tailor her outreach to kids in the district.

“I won’t be doing any treatment anymore,” she said. “I’m running a prevention program called Too Good For Drugs in four elementary schools in Baldwin. It’s a 10-week series and it reinforces decision-making, goal-setting and making kids aware of the dangers of drugs. It helps with self-esteem and education and it doesn’t cost the district anything other than this space. So far the kids have been very receptive.”

As she described her new program’s focus, Rotundo retrieved a prop she uses in her lectures, “Violet Ovalsponge” — a kitchen sponge decorated with facial features. She needed only to rotate her chair to reach the prop because her entire office is essentially within arm’s reach. “Violet here helps me show the kids what happens when you drink alcohol,” Rotundo said, giving the sponge a squeeze. “How your body absorbs more and more alcohol as you drink.”

The prevention program prioritizes heading off problems before they start. “We think fifth grade is a good age to reach these kids,” she said. “We think the sooner you start throwing ideas at the children, the better chance they have of sticking. It’s been a real transition for me. When I first went to college, my focus was on education and teaching. But I never ended up in the classroom. I got a clerical job at the BCADA, and I was inspired to go back to school to study social work. Now, 25 years later, I’ve ended up in the classroom.”

Rotundo has plans for her agency’s future. She is coordinating with the Baldwin Civic Association and hopes to start a community coalition that will address mental health. But for the moment, the BCADA seems to have achieved maximum efficiency. It is difficult to imagine that an organization operating on a smaller scale would qualify as an organization at all.

But even as she conducts her affairs on the most modest level, Rotundo must still fight for funding. During the same period that the BCADA revealed its planned partnership with the BCA, she attended a public legislative forum. As it has for the better part of 20 years, the BCADA’s funding from the state has become hung up somewhere in county coffers and has yet to be distributed. Rotundo was on hand, once again, to draw attention to this accounting tangle.

“My name is Claudia Rotundo,” she began, smiling grimly. “I was the director of the Baldwin Council Against Drug Abuse. Now I am the Baldwin Council Against Drug Abuse. Most of you have seen me here before …”