EDITORIAL: The new YMCA facility on Culver Road will offer a wide range of classes. Help celebrate the Y’s new home and become a part of its family.
The South Brunswick Family YMCA officially showed off its new home on Culver Road on Sunday with a party.
The afternoon featured a host of activities for kids, including face-painting, clowns and games. There were demonstrations of programs and tours of the new 19,000-square-foot building.
It was a long-awaited afternoon, the climax of a five-year drive to create a permanent home for an organization that already has become a vital and integral part of the community.
The Y began operations in town in the fall of 1995, hosting programs in the township’s schools and running its business operations from the Monmouth Junction First Aid Squad building on New Road.
The idea was to provide some programs sports and enrichment activities and to gauge the level of interest of South Brunswick residents.
What Y officials found was that South Brunswick wanted a Y and was willing to support a new facility. Programs grew and the Y’s volunteer board of directors began raising money.
And now, just five years after first organizing as an offshoot of the Princeton Family YMCA, South Brunswick has its own Y.
It is traditional when families move into their new homes to drop by with a housewarming gift to help them settle in.
We suggest local residents do the same for the Y. But instead of bringing a crystal candy dish or a coffee ring, we recommend you take a tour and become a member.
The new facility on Culver Road will offer a wide range of classes including karate, yoga, tai chi, aerobics and weight training. It also will offer organized volleyball, basketball and baseball games for youths and adults and a 20-foot-by-40-foot swimming pool. It will offer after-school programs including swimming, sports, martial arts, science and art designed to augment the school district’s programs. And it will offer enrichment programs including swimming and dance lessons, arts and crafts, science classes and reading times.
It also will have full- and half-day child care for infants through age 5. Full-day child care will cost $150 to $180 a week, depending on the age of the child. All enrolled children 3 and up will get a free swim lesson once a week, and children 2 years old and up will get a free dance lesson once a week.
Basic adult memberships cost $35 a month, membership for children under 12 costs $50 a year, and membership for those age 12 to 17 costs $95 a year. An entire family membership costs $46 a month, but families receive a free membership if a child is enrolled in the child-care center.
So help celebrate the Y’s new home and become a part of its family.