After nearly 20 years, Idaho’s newest Boys & Girls Club finally becoming a reality
It was 2005 when the city of Kuna completed a feasibility study that showed the need, desire and support for a Boys & Girls Club in the once-rural, fast-growing suburb of Boise.
Since then, the city has nearly tripled in population (10,596 in 2005 to 30,000 today), and the need and desire is greater than ever.
The first time I wrote about the possibility of a Boys & Girls Club coming to Kuna was in October 2006, after Colleen Braga, director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Ada County, gave a presentation to the Kuna Kiwanis Club. My headline: “Kuna Boys & Girls Club closer to reality.”
That was technically true — I just didn’t think it would take another 18 years for it to become a reality.
But that day is finally here.
The first new Boys & Girls Club to open in Ada County in 16 years is having a grand opening on Friday, July 12.
“This community will benefit very greatly from this club,” said Kuna club director Cori Norton, as she choked up talking about the children who will be served. “We have lots of kids — and I’m going to get emotional, kids are my life — and we have a lot of kids who need to be here with us, and we will take care of them and give them a safe place to come so that the parents don’t worry about them being out on the streets.”
Child care crisis
The 27,000-square-foot Boys & Girls Club of Kuna is at 470 W. Mendi Place, tucked in a residential neighborhood next to a city park and within a mile of Kuna High School, Kuna Middle School and no fewer than four elementary schools.
About 5,000 children live or go to school within a mile of the club. So far, 306 kids are already enrolled in the club, with another 73 on a waiting list.
The club will serve children of all ages. That’s because it includes about 3,500 square feet for a separate child care facility that will be run by Giraffe Laugh.
It’s actually the child care portion of the club that relaunched the efforts to open a Boys & Girls Club a couple of years ago.
CS Beef Packers, which had recently opened a plant near Kuna, found itself with about 100 open positions that it was struggling to fill. One of the problems: Families didn’t have adequate child care in Kuna.
So CS donated $4 million to re-enegrize the $10 million capital campaign to build the club. Its name adorns the top of the building.
It’s been a long time coming. I’ll give you the abridged version: The city originally planned to donate the southwest corner of Deer Flat and Linder roads for the club, but the Ada County Highway District determined that the green park there was a drainage area for the roads, so that site was kiboshed.
Longtime Kuna farmer Ralph Mellin stepped up and donated part of his land on Mendi Place and a bunch of time and money to get approvals, and the club was back on track. But city concerns, neighbor opposition and the Great Recession stalled plans for years.
In the meantime, the Boys & Girls Club opened a program in Reed Elementary School and the Old Fourth Street Gym. But it just wasn’t the same or as good as having a modern, dedicated facility.
A group of dedicated Kuna residents, including Brenda Blitman, Tim and Belinda Gordon, Duane and Judy Yamamoto, Wilma and Lavar Thornton, Joe Luppens, Cathy Gealy, Connie Roberts, Don and Mary Johnson, and Janis Dotson Bartholomew — many of whom were at that 2006 Kiwanis meeting and some who are no longer with us — kept the dream alive.
Braga noted the support of the Kuna community, which she said has more monthly donors than any other city in the county. Boys & Girls Clubs of Ada County runs clubs in Garden City and Meridian.
When CS Beef Packers came through with its donation in 2022, just like that, the club was closer to reality once again.
In addition to CS, other donors got on board, including the Idaho Workforce Development Council, the J. R. Simplot Company Foundation and the Tomlinson Foundation.
The child care area will serve 66 children, from birth to pre-K, with a separate entrance and fenced-in playground.
Blitman, who’s been involved from the very beginning, got emotional when I asked her about the child care area and how that exceeded all expectations for when the club was first envisioned.
“Everybody was just overjoyed to have this part,” Blitman said, tearing up. “It’s beyond what we expected, so much bigger than we thought it would be.”
Look inside
The two clubs in Garden City and Meridian were existing buildings modified for their current purpose.
But the Kuna club was built from the ground up, and Erstad Architects toured the existing buildings to see what worked and what didn’t. Those lessons were integrated into the Kuna club, Braga said.
“This is our first club that we built ourselves,” Braga said. “And we built this the way we wanted to build it.”
That includes open lines of sight, bathrooms in every area, open hand-washing stations, hand dryers instead of paper towels, sound-deadening acoustic panels and more storage space.
The club’s open lobby has a check-in desk, a wing for offices, a counseling room and a “chill room” for children with sensory issues.
Off the lobby is the teen room, open and light-filled, with windows on the front and a garage door on the side that can be opened in nice weather.
The teen room has its own bathrooms, will have a pool table, video game stations, roll-out picnic tables, soft seating and a big-screen TV.
The teen center will be free to every child 6th grade and up.
Children in kindergarten through fifth grade pay $25 per week, but the club offers scholarships to anyone who can’t afford to pay.
All kids attending the club get breakfast, lunch and a snack, free of charge.
The club includes a full-service kitchen and cafeteria, again with separate bathrooms. The cafeteria connects to a full-size gym, and together, they can be locked out from the rest of the building to rent out for community events.
The gym has a cool feature where the Boys & Girls Club logo is built into the bricks on one wall.
The youth wing for kids K-5 features a games room with soft seating and a ping pong table.
There’s also flex classroom space, a technology lab that will include computers, laptop stations and printers, an art room, an education center, and a STEM lab with a 3D printer. Meta, which is building a data center in Kuna, and the Idaho Women’s Charitable Foundation donated to the STEM lab.
Outside will be a greenhouse and a walking path to the nearby city park.
“I have hired some great leaders to make this a place where kids will cry to go home, not cry because they have to come here,” club director Norton said. “That’s my goal as a director here at Kuna is to make it a place where kids will wake up in the morning and go, ‘Mom, I want to go to Boys & Girls Club.’”
The club is a testament to the sense of community, dedication and purpose, of working toward a goal that benefits others and which will continue to serve the community for years to come, long after many of us have come and gone.
It’s the Idaho Way.
“We talked about it 19 years ago, we dreamed about it and we tried to talk to people about what it would look like,” Blitman said during a recent tour of the building. “It was two steps forward, one step back. … There was just a lot of things along the way that made it really stop and go. The underlying patience of people having a vision for something bigger in Kuna than what we could imagine, it’s just unbelievable that it’s here.”
If you go
The grand opening of the new Kuna Boys & Girls Club is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Friday, July 12, at 470 W. Mendi Place, Kuna.
This story was originally published July 8, 2024 at 4:00 AM.
