CHANGES IN CHARLESTON, FINAL PART; PROGRAMS PLAY ROLE IN CITY'S PROGRESSION

C. F. Bowden Civic Center provides several programs for students after school that have been funded through grants.

CHARLESTON -- Community leaders agree social programs have played a main role in Charleston's recent progression from an economic and educational decline. In particular, programs at work in the town's economically deprived west side are promising to uplift the community.

The Susanna Wesley Learning Center in nearby East Prairie has been instrumental in developing youth programs throughout Mississippi County. The organization was developed by a group of residents "who felt there was a real need for support for families," said Jerry McDowell Jr., who writes grants and implements programs for the center."They felt, in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Charleston really hit a low point," said McDowell, a lifelong resident of Charleston's west side. "They wanted to effect change and felt this was the best way to go about it." The Susanna Wesley Center has sponsored numerous programs in the community in the past five years, including an afterschool program that provides Charleston and East Prairie schools with $600,000 annually for a three-year period.

That program, in addition to the positive adult leadership mentoring program, male responsibility parenting classes, and a minority arts program are showing signs of progress, McDowell said.

Programs like We Vision, short for West End Vision, are teaching the town's youths that good citizenship and educational values can take them out of the town's five public housing complexes and into a more enterprising future. Those values are important because the community's youths appear to have no direction and have an attitude that "this is all there is," McDowell said."In the late 1980s, there was an expectation that you would not only graduate from high school, but if you didn't want to go to college, you had to go find a job," said McDowell. "The expectation somehow has changed." Felecia DeMyers, Charleston unit director for the Boys and Girls Club of the Bootheel, said she also is beginning to see attitudes change in her hometown. DeMyers develops and implements programs in the C.F. Bowden Civic Center, a former segregated black school that also houses the Charleston Housing Authority's central offices.

DeMyers works daily to provide Charleston youths with recreational activities, leadership classes, and an overall "safe place to go." Her goal is to teach them to value education, hard work, confidence and a desire to better themselves."So many little girls are pushing a stroller, and that's all they know," she said. "They think they've made it when they get their own public housing. I'm trying to teach them that's not all there is."