San Marcos teen center gets additional funding
The nonprofit Boys & Girls Club of San Marcos received funding from Sony Electronics to run its Best Buy Teen Tech Center for another five years.
The 2,000-square-foot Teen Tech Center, which opened in 2017 with a grant from Best Buy, gives kids 13-18 a chance to get hands-on experience using state-of-the-art technology in areas ranging from programming and filmmaking to music production and design.
The San Marcos site is one of 35 such Best Buy Teen Tech Centers across North America and one of three in California.
“We know the needs of teens — and our collective responsibility to act — have never been so high,” said Andrea Wood, vice president of social impact at Best Buy.
The idea is for teens to develop critical skills and explore their creative interests through hands-on projects that allow them to work together with peers as they learn tech skills under the guidance of adult mentors.
The program allows kids to find out how technology can help them in school and prepare them for the workplace. The experience can lead students to explore new career possibilities, such as in the area of science, technology, engineering and math.
The funding is aimed at teens who might not otherwise have access to the latest technology and comes from Sony’s Global Social Justice Fund.
The Teen Tech Center is currently limiting the number of people allowed inside at a given time, in accordance with COVID-19 regulations. But the club also has a staff member to meet with teens virtually and the club has special hours to help kids with online schooling.
The Teen Tech Center opened in 1979 at Woodland Park, serving several hundred kids. By 1995, the club grew to 1,000 members and the 16,000-square-foot main branch, called the Jennifer Loscher Building, opened. A decade later in 2005, the 6,500-square-foot teen center opened to serve high-schoolage youths. The club runs its programs at 13 sites throughout San Marcos and serves more than 4,000 people ages 6 to 18.. The Teen Tech Center built three years ago is the latest addition to the main campus.