A new home

The Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club will once again be opening its doors to the children of Evangeline Parish.
The club opened to great fanfare from the community last summer, as a total of 100 kids between the ages of 8 to 18 years old took part in the 42-day interactive summer program, as the old Evangeline Bank & Trust Company building on the corner of Court and Main Streets was revamped into a learning center for the parish’s youth.
The Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club was so successful that the plan was to host an after-school program last fall between the hours of 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. That unfortunately didn’t come to pass due to the historic flooding throughout Evangeline Parish and the City of Ville Platte in August.
Even though the building served as a temporary shelter during the flooding, the historic structure suffered flood damage and the multiple leaks in the roof caused additional damage. That meant the proposed fall program had to be scrapped.
“Right now we are waiting on some grant money and hoping to get some additional donations to help with the repairs,” Ville Platte Mayor Jennifer Vidrine said. “The damage is substantial. Especially from the roof. It is an old building and costly to replace.”
Despite the issues with last summer’s location, the Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club will reopen this coming summer in its new larger location -- the six-plus acres of the old Heritage Manor Nursing Home at 220 South Thompson Street which was donated to the City of Ville Platte last October.
The dates for summer registration have not been released yet but will be within the next month or so.
“The summer program will be moved out to there,” Vidrine said. “We have more space and we will be able to serve more children.”
“Are we sad that we are leaving that building?,” Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club Director Dianna Freeman said. “Yes. But we will still use it for something. We are just growing into the next phase.”
The flooding of the old location may prove to be a silver lining for the Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club.
“After the flood we were able to make a few phone contacts and found out how important it was over the summer to the people in the community,” Freeman said. “So we asked them what the positives were from the program but also what we could do better moving forward. What they all suggested was that we needed more space. Moving it to the new location really provides us with an opportunity to better serve them.”
Freeman is excited about the new or expanded activities that the club will be able to offer this summer due to the increased space.
“We are going to be having a music class for the summer which we are really excited about,” Freeman said. “We will also have the space and kitchen for our culinary class which is going to be great. Also with us being at the new facility, transportation will not be an issue and we won’t have to reduce the number of kids we take in. We will have more kids and more volunteers.”
As of now, the Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club is gearing up for the summer program while also trying to raise additional funding for the program and for repairs to the former location.
For those residents interested in donating they can make their checks out to the Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club and can either drop them off at City Hall or mail them to City of Ville Platte, P.O. Box 390, Ville Platte, LA 70586.
Another way that residents can donate is by attending the Old Fashioned Boucherie & Smoke Meat Cook-Off being held at the Northside Civic Center in Ville Platte on Saturday, February 25. Admission is $5 and all proceeds will benefit the club.
“We are just asking people to come out and support us,” Freeman said. “It will be a fun event.”
Even though the Ville Platte Boys & Girls Club could have easily remained closed due to the flooding, the impact the club had on the children of the community was inspiring to those involved with the club.
“The club really had a tremendous impact on the kids,” Vidrine said. “It had an all around impact on the kids. It gave them discipline, dedication, responsibility, hard work and manners. What was very rewarding were the comments from the parents on how the club helped their kids. The kids would wake the parents up to go there in the morning. Some of them wanted to skip summer vacation just to go there so we will had no choice but to come back.”