Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Sixth-grader Robert Tucker and staff member Annie Guichard play Nintendo at newly opened Warner Hutton House.

Warner Hutton House reopens

Teen center offers place to hang out

By Sarah Lombardo

The radio blared, the Nintendo blipped and the sound of billiard balls making contact smacked the air. The Warner Hutton House opened again for teens last Tuesday.

The house, closed as a teen center after drooping attendance and city budget cuts in 1995, celebrated its reopening with very little fanfare on the first day of school. The closed sign was flipped over to read open, and counselors simply opened the doors.

"We had a lot of kids come through with their parents for a tour just to look around," Youth Commission adviser Beverly Tucker said.

The teen program provides Saratoga middle and junior high school students an alternative to going straight home, possibly to an empty house, after school.

At the center, students can watch television, play Nintendo, listen to the radio, play ping-pong and pool or just sit around and talk. The program also boasts a study room, a daily movie, supervised activities and counselors who can help with homework.

One mother on a tour of the house with her daughter said she was so impressed with the program that she was going straight over to the city offices to make a donation.

"I think it's fantastic," Catherine Hendel said. "[Students] get to meet other kids and have fun."

Hendel said most days a housekeeper picks up her daughter, Erika, from school, but sometimes she just won't have time. On those days, Erika would have to wait or make her way home to an empty house.

"[The Warner Hutton House] is a good place for my daughter to come and a wonderful thing for the city to do," Hendel said.

"It'll work out well," agreed Erika, an eighth-grader at Redwood Middle School. "I can come here and make friends."

Other students apparently have the same idea: Only 30 minutes after area junior high schools let out, about 15 students had signed in, and many others wandered through the house to take a look.

"I think it's a really good place for kids who can't go home," Redwood sixth-grader Frances Sun said. "It's a good place for kids to hang out, and it has a good environment."

Tucker said that although she had expected fewer students on the first day of school, she knew that there was a lot of interest in the new program.

"We've had many parents call the city and call the schools for more information and want to go on tours before it even opened," she said. Tucker said she's already received registration slips for 41 students.

The first-day popularity of the program sharply contrasts to when it closed last year. Then, because they had to pay an hourly fee, students said it felt like the house was a daycare center. Students lost interest, attendance lagged and students began hanging out at the Saratoga Community Library and West Valley College.

Saratoga teens said they had nothing to do and nowhere to go that was theirs.

After months of meetings and petition circulating by the Youth Commission, the City Council agreed in July to partially fund a revamped teen program at the Warner Hutton House. The new program would be completely free, ending the daycare atmosphere the former program had taken on.

"This is not daycare," Tucker stressed. "Kids sign themselves in and out, not mom and dad. This is a drop-in program."

Tucker said she makes sure parents are aware of the responsibility given to students and wants parents to understand that the house offers students a place just for them,but does not require them to stay.

"We don't forbid anyone from leaving," she added.

Tucker said counselors, mostly college students who are recreational studies majors, will try to stress to students the importance of signing in and out so that in case of an emergency, someone knows where they are. Counselors will also ask students to take home and fill out emergency phone number cards for the counselors to keep on file.

Sun said she thought the program felt just like hanging out at someone's house.

Greg Wilburn, a Redwood eighth-grader, had already racked up for a game of pool. "The most important thing to me about getting the house opened again was to come here, play pool and do homework," he said, cue stick in hand.

The new program may let teenagers feel like the house is theirs, but that feeling has come with a price. The $8,450 partial funding for the program from the City Council runs out in January, and that leaves the Youth Commission the task of raising the other $8,450 to keep it running. So far, the commissioners have raised a little more than $2,400.

Anyone interested in the tournament or in making a donation to the Warner Hutton House Teen Program can call Joan Pisani, Saratoga recreation director, at 867-3438, ext. 250.