Parents scramble for programming

Elmont parents accustomed to sending their children to free summer programs provided by the Gateway Outreach Program and the Elmont Union Free School District have had to find other ways to keep their youngsters busy this summer. The Elmont Cardinals, a nonprofit youth sports group, is helping them do that.

Patrick Boyle, executive director of the Gateway program in Elmont, got a visit from one set of parents who complained that they had to send their 7-year-old son to Colombia for the summer so family members there could care for him.

Gateway recently lost its Nassau County funding and can no longer offer families low-cost summer programs. On top of that, the Elmont school district is no longer providing summer programs for some 1,000 children. Families that can afford to are going elsewhere, while those who can’t are forced to leave children at home, with little to no supervision, Boyle said. “That gave parents an opportunity to be able to go to work,” he said of the summer programs. “Some of these parents work in the kind of jobs where they don’t have a choice.”

On July 5, 43 private youth agencies and 15 mental-health and addiction-treatment agencies that receive annual county contracts for services lost their funding. Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano sent out letters in June warning the agencies that they would lose their funding unless Democratic members of the County Legislature were willing to join the Legislature’s 10 Republicans and approve a measure to borrow $41 million to pay the county’s tax-certiorari debts.

The Legislature’s minority leader, Kevan Abrahams, said that Democrats would not approve bonding unless Republicans agreed on a redistricting plan that would include public hearings before the Legislature’s 2013 vote on the final map. Democrats have charged that the redistricting map proposed by Republicans in 2011 would gerrymander Democrats out of at least two seats in the Legislature and ensure Republican control of it.

Elmont children who are in need of summer school also lost out this year, when the school district was forced to cut the program in order to save $971,000.