PUTTING CHILDREN FIRST... OUT ON THE STREET: I ran into Tim Wells in the soft drink aisle at the Clark Ave. Topps on Saturday. Tim ran Clark Recreation Center in the Stockyards neighborhood, back when I worked for the local CDC. Now he's in charge of the Recreation Division's citywide "organized sports" programs -- what's left of them after the budget cuts.

Tim told me that the 16% cut in the Parks and Recreation budget means that about 300 Summer rec workers won't be hired this year, which means very short staff for programs at the City's 20 recreation centers and 19 neighborhood pools -- and no staffed programs at 30 neighborhood playgrounds that had them last year. The 19 pools will only be open for six weeks, from Tuesday through Sunday.

Think about this for a minute. The City of Cleveland has about 470,000 residents, of whom something like 100,000 are school-age kids. Last Summer, the City had over sixty places where those kids could go for some kind of organized, supervised recreation -- one place for every 1,500 kids, more or less. This Summer, thirty of those places will be gone, and another nineteen (the pools) will be closed for half the season. The ratio of staffed recreation sites to kids will fall as low as 1 to 5,000.

So if you want your child to play safely in a Cleveland neighborhood playground this Summer, and you don't happen to live near a rec center, get ready to go down there and stand guard for a few hours. Be sure to bring a broom and some trash bags along for last night's crop of broken glass... the City will only be cleaning once a month. And try not to do anything that could get you sued, since the City offers no liability coverage for parental volunteers.

Oh, you're working days? Too bad... guess you'll just have to lock the kids in the house with the X-Box for company.

Boy, this is gonna be an awful year.