St. Mary’s County will formally open a new Boys & Girls Club at the Carver Recreation Center in Lexington Park with a grand opening ceremony Sept. 15 at 5 p.m., in a building whose own history runs directly through the county’s push to expand opportunity for local youth.
The event, hosted jointly by the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County, the county’s Department of Recreation & Parks and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maryland, will include a brief ceremony followed by facility tours and a chance for families to meet program staff. The club will offer after-school and enrichment programming aimed at academic support, healthy habits, character development and leadership, giving families a supervised option for children outside school hours. Commissioner President Randy Guy said the club’s opening reflects the county’s commitment to investing in young people by expanding opportunities for them to thrive.
Anna Hanzsche, chief executive of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maryland, credited the community and the office of state Sen. Jack Bailey for helping bring the club to Lexington Park. The new space will include a learning center, a STEM lab and a game room, with programming spanning STEM, workforce development, academic readiness, social-emotional wellness, and sports and recreation. The club will serve more than 100 young people, according to Hanzsche, expanding beyond the organization’s existing satellite site on Midway Drive in Lexington Park.
The Carver Recreation Center itself carries particular local significance. The building opened in 1958 as Carver Heights, a segregated elementary and high school built for the county’s Black students; it became a middle school in 1967 when St. Mary’s County schools integrated, then reverted to an elementary school before eventually being converted into the county’s recreation center that bears the name today. The Boys & Girls Club is the latest in a series of investments at the facility: the county, the St. Mary’s County Arts Council and the nonprofit PaxSpace are separately completing a roughly 5,000-square-foot Carver Community Arts Center & Makerspace in the building’s east wing, backed by a $100,000 state grant for equipment and a $450,000 Maryland State Arts Council capital grant — the highest-scoring arts-capital application submitted statewide.
The Boys & Girls Club’s after-school program at Carver had already begun serving students, with registration opening ahead of the school year; the Sept. 15 event marks the facility’s formal grand opening rather than its first day of operation. The Carver club joins existing Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maryland sites in North Beach and Indian Head, part of a statewide network the Maryland Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs says serves youth in 19 counties and Baltimore City. The alliance has cited state estimates that nearly 200,000 young people in Maryland leave school each day with nowhere supervised to go, and points to research suggesting every dollar invested in a Boys & Girls Club returns roughly $9.60 in future earnings and cost savings to the surrounding community.
Community members are encouraged to attend the ceremony and tour the new space.
