SEQUIM — Ever since she was the only girl on the boys’ team, Mary Budke has been one to go the distance.
Budke, 51, looks after some 360 youngsters every weekday at two locations: the Sequim and Port Angeles units of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula. She took a short break recently for lunch with a reporter and, with some prodding, described the circuitous road that brought her here.
“I was a lunch lady,” she begins. Back in 2004, Budke was working in the kitchens at both Helen Haller Elementary School and the Boys & Girls Club in Sequim — while earning a Master of Science in education from Old Dominion University.
Going the distance
She learned about stamina while growing up in Casper, Wyo. As a teenager, she loved to run, and joined the track and cross-country teams despite the fact that not many girls did such things back in the mid-1970s.
Upon graduation from high school in 1978, Budke won a full-ride athletic scholarship to Idaho State University in Pocatello. There, she earned a dual degree in sociology and history, in hopes of becoming a teacher. But the dean of the liberal arts college discouraged her from that profession, and Budke switched her sights to a career in law.
Those plans changed, too, when she and her husband, Steven Budke, welcomed their first son, Brennan, into the world in 1988.
Fast-forward a decade and a half, when Budke was at last poised to apply for a teaching job in the Sequim School District. She had completed her master’s degree at Old Dominion — after driving every Friday and Saturday to the satellite campus in Bangor. This was 2006; Brennan was 17 and his brother Spencer 13.
Then Todd Bale, then the Boys & Girls Clubs’ executive director, asked Budke if she would consider starting a program for kindergartners at the Sequim club. She was more than interested. As director of KinderKids, she created the Monday-through-Friday program providing music, art, physical fitness, social studies and science activities plus lunch and snacks for 5- and 6-year-olds. Budke also authored a grant application that brought the new program $7,500 from the Qwest Foundation.
When Bale resigned in 2007, she was promoted to Sequim unit director, and became supervisor of the 25,000-square-foot club where hundreds of 5- to 18-year-olds come after school.
Then, last May, Boys & Girls Clubs Executive Director Bob Schilling abruptly resigned, and Budke was asked to step in as interim chief.
Permanent director
After a nearly six-month search that yielded 45 candidates, Budke was named permanent executive director in November. Upon her hiring, she vowed to keep on with her kid-centered work, “with a vengeance.”
The Boys & Girls Clubs require of their leader exactly that: a brand of passion that doesn’t burn out. These buildings, at 400 W. Fir St. in Sequim and at 2620 S. Francis St. in Port Angeles, are meant to be refuges for any child or teenager who needs, as the club slogan goes, “a positive place.” And they are not just for the good students, the athletes or the delightful little ones.
Budke is known for her perseverance with all kinds of young people. She’s known for trying to help a boy who was expelled from Sequim High School for fighting and other behavior that could shock even a seasoned teacher. Budke sought to get the youth, then 16, back into school last year. He’s had more personal and academic trouble since then — and she continues to be his advocate.
Others at the Boys & Girls Club are wondering if the boy will ever turn around, if he’ll believe in himself the way Budke does, said longtime club volunteer Stephen Rosales.
Yet “Mary is still fighting for him,” he added. And this teen is not an isolated case. Rosales recalled one night last spring when a young woman, whom he and Budke had watched grow up at the Sequim club, was crumpled on a curb on Fir Street, weeping. Budke, on her way home from work, pulled over.
Offers comfort
She sat down to comfort the teenager, and learned she was suffering from a serious infection in her foot — and had nowhere to stay that night. Budke found her a place at Serenity House’s shelter in Port Angeles, arranged for her to receive medical care, and later drove to Port Angeles to check on her and take her out for lunch.
“These ‘kids’ are not kids anymore,” and not technically the clubs’ responsibility, Rosales said. That didn’t stop Budke. The young woman has since moved out of the shelter; she has a man in her life, and Budke hears she is drug-free.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her,” she adds.
But Budke is no Pollyanna. She is acquainted with the thing called compassion fatigue. “It does get to you,” she says.
One way Budke unwinds is by doing as she has done for decades: Go out for a run.
There isn’t much ground in and around Sequim she hasn’t covered on foot, she says; “I wouldn’t say I’m fast. But I could always go long.” Her longest distance so far is 13 miles, a half-marathon; her goal is to run a whole one before her 55th birthday.
The young people Budke works with at the Boys & Girls Clubs, meantime, are a powerful source of inspiration.
“I see kids achieving,” she says, “against all odds.” Budke gives as an example Thomas Gallagher, the 2010 Sequim High School graduate who won a scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
“Thomas came out of the [Sequim] teen club,” she says, smiling. On a recent visit to Sequim, Gallagher came in to the club to say he wanted to donate his family’s ping-pong table to the club kids, as it’s getting little use since he went off to college.
“That,” Budke said, “is what I call giving back.”
Awake at night
The director admits, however, that she lies awake on many nights, thinking about Boys & Girls Clubs members who are struggling in school and in life. She also worries about the future of the two youth centers in Sequim and Port Angeles. The Sequim City Council reduced its funding of the teen program from $60,000 in 2010 to $12,500 this year; Budke is constantly searching for new fundraising ideas and for grants. The club charges basic membership dues of $30 per year per child for after-school programs — but no one is turned away, Budke says. Dues have never been the Boys & Girls Clubs’ primary funding source.
And some families are having a tough time in the lingering recession, Budke says. Some weeks ago, a mother of a kindergartner told her she could no longer afford the $80 per week for her child to take part in KinderKids at the Sequim club.
Then Budke got some news: Jane Wishita of the Qwest Foundation phoned to say Budke’s latest grant application was successful. Wishita delivered a check for $12,500 on Feb. 4.
“I was over the moon,” Budke said. She’ll use the grant money for scholarships, so that mom, and other financially strapped parents, won’t have to pull their children out of KinderKids.
Another bit of good news came earlier this year from Barbara Brown of Sequim, who organizes The Gateway, an annual fundraiser that splits its proceeds between a local nonprofit and the Promise of Hope Foundation that Brown helped establish. The latter organization helps purchase uniforms and basic supplies for children in rural Uganda; the Boys & Girls Clubs will be this year’s local beneficiary.
“Lines on a map?” Budke asked. “They don’t matter, when it comes to kids.”
Any money from The Gateway, she adds, will be directed to the club’s activities for teenagers.
Budke lists her priorities for both Boys & Girls Clubs: “No. 1 is academic success: to get these kids through school with diploma in hand and looking forward,” to higher education. “We work with the ‘late bloomers’ as well,” and teach healthy living skills and the ethic of sharing one’s gifts with the wider community.
“If we can do those three things,” Budke says, “we’re there.”
