For the past 22 years, our organization has worked hard to provide young people with a safe and fun place to go when they are not in school. It was our focus on safety that caused us to drastically change our operations two months ago, and it is this same focus on safety that will force us to change how we operate this summer.

In late-March, the CDC announced new social gathering guidelines that limited groups “to no more than 10 people”. After closing all of our Clubs, we reopened our Nap Lawrence Branch with limited capacity (64 total spots) to serve emergency and critical healthcare families from Banner Casa Grande Medical Center and Sun Life Family Health Center (since then, we have also opened up spots for families from the Casa Grande Fire and Police Departments). While we are now at a point where our city and state are starting to “open back up”, the CDC has not updated their social gathering guidelines (although we will share our plan for when they do later in this post). As we prepare for our Summer Program(which will officially start on Tuesday, May 26), we will move forward with the same capacity limits.

First responders and healthcare professionals continue to lead the charge as our nation battles the COVID-19 health crisis. We want to support these brave men and women and their families. In recognition of the critical role they play in the overall welfare of our community, we will continue to serve the families that we are currently serving during our summer program. Based on current attendance, we have 25 additional spots that we can offer to the general public. We know that this number does not come close to meeting the demand for our services (last summer, 558 members registered for our summer program and we had an average daily attendance of 219), but this is the maximum number of members we can add while still maintaining the safest environment possible. Over the past two weeks, we have had a series of discussions to determine the best way for us to host “Summer Registration” this year in a safe and fair manner. As a result, we believe that a lottery is the best way for us to move forward.

HOW THE LOTTERY WILL WORK

If you are interested in having your child(ren) attend our program this summer, please send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with each child’s name, age, grade, a parent’s name, and a parent’s phone number (as a reminder, our summer program is open to children beginning grades 1-8). The deadline to submit this email is 8:00 am on Tuesday, May 19. We will respond to each email to confirm receipt and to share each child’s assigned number. We will then use the random number generator on random.org to generate the list of members who will be able to attend our summer program. Once the list has been generated, we will reconnect with the selected families to begin the summer program enrollment process. As we strive to make this process as transparent as possible, we will broadcast the number generation as a Facebook Live event at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, May 19.

LOOKING AHEAD

We anticipate that the CDC and local health officials will provide updated social gathering guidelines soon. If/as these guidelines allow for larger groups, we will add more spots to our summer program and we will use the same lottery-system outlined above to fill the additional spots.

We know that many of you rely on our programs. We appreciate your trust in us, and we look forward to the day when we will be allowed to operate all of our Clubs at full capacity again! Unfortunately, we know that we won’t be able to serve every interested family this summer. This is a heartbreaking situation for us, we love having a gym full of laughing kids and helping to prepare them for a great future. We know that some longtime members won’t get in and we know that families who really need us won’t get in. We wish this wasn’t our current reality, but it is. Given that reality, we think that a lottery is the fairest way to move forward. Please know this pandemic does not change our commitment to this community. We will continue to offer high-quality youth development programs in a safe environment to as many young people as we can.