Closing in December, after over 60 years
Members will be invited to join other clubs
One of the longest-running Boys & Girls Clubs in Milwaukee will permanently close at the end of December, five years after it sold the building and began making plans to shut down.
The Augusta M. LaVarnway Boys & Girls Club, 2739 N. 15th St., will close a few months before the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee’s lease of the building expires, according to the organization.
“Change is always a challenge,” Kathy ThorntonBias, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, said in an interview. “While this decision is strategically important to the longterm sustainability of the clubs, we’ve worked really hard to try to make the transition as smooth as possible.”
The Boys & Girls Club locations closest to LaVarnway are North Division High School, LaFollette School, Clarke Street School and Siefert School. Within two miles of LaVarnway are the club at Riverwest Elementary, Fitzsimonds Boys & Girls Club, Pieper-Hillside Boys & Girls Club and the club at Carver Academy of Mathematics and Science.
LaVarnway, which opened in 1957, is the oldest of the organization’s six legacy clubs, which are generally the largest and longest-standing locations, according to Dawn Matson, spokesperson for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee.
The organization offers after-school and summer programming at 44 club locations throughout Milwaukee.
Upon hearing the news, some people who used to go to LaVarnway took to Facebook, praising the role that the club played in the community and lamenting its pending closure. They remembered learning to swim at the club or recalled the mentors who helped shape them.
Bukata Hayes, who used to walk to the club after school in the mid-1980s, remembers playing bumper pool in the game room and shooting hoops during open gym on Friday and Saturday nights, even after his family moved out of the neighborhood when he was in middle school.
“The Boys and Girls Club was central to showing us these ways we can transcend our current situation and strive for better,” Hayes said in an interview.
He said workers looked after the young people like family, and if someone didn’t show up for a while, they made sure there were no problems.
Hayes said he was saddened by the news of the club’s closure, but also grateful for what it had given him.
“I can honestly say the LaVarnway ... Club molded me for a lifetime of success and really prepped me for this journey as a young Black man,” said Hayes, who now works as the vice president of racial and health equity at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota.
There are 88 children and teens currently enrolled at the LaVarnway Club, each of whom will be
invited to join a different club, a Boys & Girls Clubs news release said. The organization will hold open houses at nearby clubs beginning in September to allow young people and their families to visit other clubs and meet the people there.
The 14 staff members working at LaVarnway will be offered positions at other sites, according to the news release.
In 2017, the Boys & Girls Clubs sold the property that LaVarnway is located on to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission, part of a broader shift the organization was making away from owning property, Thornton-Bias said.
Since then, the club has been leasing part of the building, with the intention of closing once the five-year lease was up, she said.
The Milwaukee Rescue Mission operates a school out of the other part of the building — Cross Trainers Academy receives K-12 students with taxpayerfunded vouchers. Once the club closes, the school plans to expand into that part of the building and offer more community outreach and programming to children and families, said Patrick Vanderburgh, president of the Rescue Mission.
“We’re noodling on that right now,” he said of the types of programs that will be offered.
LaVarnway plans to close at the end of December, a few months before the end of its lease in the middle of the spring semester, in order to “minimize any service interruptions for Club members” and to provide “a clean stopping point for members,” the release says.
In the last few years, several other club locations on Milwaukee’s north side have been closed, including ones at Brown Street School, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School, Keefe Avenue School and the Milwaukee Collegiate Academy, now known as the Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy.
Most of the 44 club locations in Milwaukee are based in schools.
Matson, the spokesperson, said the operating costs for Milwaukee’s six legacy clubs are mostly funded by the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, as opposed to the school-based sites, which are funded by federal grants.
Matson said there are no plans currently to close other clubs.
Sarah Volpenhein is a Report for America corps reporter who focuses on news of value to underserved communities for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Email her at svolpenhei@gannett.com. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a taxdeductible gift to this reporting effort at JSOnline.com/RFA.