Features

What’s so impossibly sad about the vitriolic editorial comments in the Daily Planet about the East Campus/Derby Street project, attacking the city, the School Board, and the writers’ fellow Berkeley citizens, is not just that their listed objections have almost no basis in reality. In fact, there is no intended “commercial” use of the proposed facilities, other than of course the use for a commercial “Farmers Market” by a private business, the Ecology Center (which everyone agrees should stay on site); t here are no planned night games or night field lighting; there is no plan for any amplified sound system (other than the Farmer’s Market request for an “entertainment” space to host music); any field, of any size, will need to be fenced for safety reasons; any field, of any size (including a regulation baseball diamond that includes a multi-purpose field) will be available for all of the dozens of sports that boys and girls play in this city; any field, of any size, will bring according to the city’s Envi ronmental Impact Report only a minimal increase in traffic; replacing the dilapidated, vermin infested portables on site now with a field of any size can only increase, not decrease, property values. 

No, what’s really sad is what has been almost completely forgotten in this debate: why we need a larger field. A small field that does not close Derby Street would serve approximately 500 children a month. A larger field that includes a regulation baseball diamond would serve more than 700 children a month, and accommodate at least a half-dozen more sports. That’s an enormous difference, especially when you stop to consider each one of those 200 kids as an individual, each with their own dreams and hopes. Right now, and forever if we don’t build the field, t he City of Berkeley cannot provide a venue for those dreams. Right now, and forever if we don’t build the field, those “rich parents from the hills” that your editorial writers scorn can drive their kids to neighboring cities and programs, and pay for their opportunities, but the low-income and disenfranchised kids of our city have nowhere to go to play. 

Of course, the benefits of serving a greater number of children extend far beyond the sports themselves. Studies show that, in addition to the positive effects of team sports on child and adolescent development (“The Role of Sports in Youth Development,” Carnegie Corporation, 1996), programs that engage school kids in organized school-related activities such as sports are enormously effective in preventi ng youth crime and violence. (“Diverting Children From a Life of Crime,” Greenwood, P., 1998; “After School Programs: Investing in Student Success,” California Department of Education, 2001; “Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, ” Fox, J., 2001.) The school-related recreational activities for the hundreds of additional children served by a larger field promise increased attachment to school, personal investment in graduation, structured activity during the after-school hours that are the greatest risk for youth crime, and positive peer and adult role models and mentoring. 

The only truly disenfranchised population in our city is our children: they can’t vote. And of that population, the most vulnerable are certainly those who, for social, economic, or other reas ons, are at risk for delinquency, truancy, teen parenthood, and all the other prevailing ills of our desperately materialistic 21st century society. You don’t see letters from these kids in the Planet; you don’t see them at the site committee meetings; th ey aren’t there at the community meetings; when they do show up at City Council meetings, as they did four years ago at the last Derby Street vote, too often it is to see their hopes and dreams rejected. In a society and a city struggling with issues like the disproportionate incarceration of young African-American males, can it really be true that we as a community can’t spare one under-used block of a city street in service to those hopes and dreams? Can it really be true that forever, as now, we as a community will allow access to adequate recreational facilities only to those citizens who have the means to get their kids to for-fee programs in other cities? It’s for the disenfranchised, at-risk youth of our community that we need to build this field; it’s for them that it has meaning and value; it’s by our commitment to them that we, our politicians, and our leaders, will be judged.