MLK Center could receive $100,000 for improvements

“The new windows [will] put that where it needs to go,” said Pat Morris, director of Rockville Centre’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, as he motioned to a classroom window cracked by what he said were bullet holes. “On the back burners in the past.”

Morris said the holes are more than a decade old, adding that he was excited upon finding out at the village board meeting briefing on June 1 that $100,000 had been set aside by State Sen. Todd Kaminsky to fix the windows throughout the center. Though the money is earmarked, final approval must still be granted by the Governor’s office.

"It's imperative that we ensure that our youth have the best facilities possible,” Kaminsky wrote to the Herald in a statement. “The King Center is a vital resource in our community, and I could not be more proud to recommend them for this grant."

The windows represent a time where the area surrounding the MLK center “was like the Wild West,” Morris said. He explained that the bullet holes, seen on a few different windows, were the result of “shooting for the sake of shooting,” and that though he didn’t know the specifics of the incidents, he acknowledged that nobody was hurt.

“This is no different from any low-income community; you have drugs, the drug sellers,” Morris said. “Drug sellers need guns to protect their property and their territory. … Even though Rockville Centre is such an affluent village, this part is not.”

Rockville Centre Police Commissioner Charles Gennario announced at a village board meeting last month that for the first quarter of 2017, crime in the village was at an all-time low.

“[That] includes this area as well,” Morris said, “and there hasn’t been any such incident in over 10 or 15 years. This is old stuff.” That’s why Morris said it’s important to move forward and rid the building of bullet holes and those types of images, which has become a norm.

Morris, 47, grew up in Rockville Centre, and began working at the MLK Center when he was 14. He had been a camp counselor and an assistant director at the facility before becoming its director nearly a decade ago. He took over shortly after David Baez was shot and killed outside the center by Rockville Centre resident Carl Perryman in 2008 following a birthday party. None of the bullet holes are related to that incident, Morris said.

The MLK Center no longer hosts adult functions and parties of that sort, he added, and instead focuses on its free services for children, which include homework assistance — as part of its after-school program — access to computers and recreational games, as well as a dance and summer program.

“This is home,” Morris said. “Especially from a children’s perspective, it’s a home away from home, and parents know that their children are here and safe.

“…People around here don’t call it the MLK, they call it the center, because it’s the center of everything that goes on around here,” he continued. “Whatever we can do to improve it, to make it nice, it benefits the children.”