Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative
| Reshica Newton. Contributed Photo. |
Reshica Newton started babysitting as a way to help out around the neighborhood. She never realized that it would turn into her dream job.
Newton, 37, is founder and director of Kids Kraze, a childcare business and summer camp located in New Haven’s Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills neighborhood. After launching in 2013, Newton has been expanding the organization to multiple sites around the city each summer. Now, she’s hoping to take the program statewide.
“The plan has always been to provide services to as many students as possible,” she said by text message Tuesday. “The ultimate goal is to make Kids Kraze a household name.”
Newton’s fascination with childcare started when she was still young, and growing up in New Haven. At eight, she got her first babysitting gigs with local kids in the neighborhood, and something about the job stuck. While other kids shirked their younger counterparts, she welcomed their bouncy, rambunctious attitudes. By the late 1990s, she was working at a summer camp in the very early days of Youth @ Work, then a stand-alone program (it is now housed in the city’s Youth Services Department).
“I’ve always been the fun one, the loud one, the person that would run in and wrestle with the kids,” she said in an interview earlier this month. “It’s one of those things that you don’t go into wanting to do. It’s just something you find that you’re good at.”
After joining Youth @ Work, Newton scored a job as a counselor with LEAP (Leadership, Education, Athletics in Partnership), where she remained for a total of three years from 1998 to 2001. During those years, she also moved through her studies at New Haven’s Career High School, later attending both Gateway Community College and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). By her own description, she bounced around jobs, all related to childcare and early childhood education.
In the early 2000s, Newton began working at an all-girls detention facility, then transferred to the New Haven Detention Center. When she moved on from that position after five years, it was to teach pre-kindergarten at Highville Charter School in New Haven’s Science Park neighborhood around 2007. Then in 2013, she decided that she wanted to try to create her own program.
She started small: a summer camp with 12 neighborhood kids and two other employees, run out of a space on Elm Street. Each year, that number swelled—first to 20, then 50, then over 100. Six years in, it has turned into 150 kids, with new activities and neighborhood programming options each summer, as well as six sites out of which the camp now runs. On the cusp of this summer, the enrollment is at the highest it has ever been.
“There are a bunch of cliches that go along with running a business, and you hear them when you’re going through it but you don’t believe it,” she said. For her, that has meant a lot of paperwork, to ensure that the program remains in compliance with regulations at both the city and the state levels. She said that it also translates to a lot of meetings and government reporting, rather than “the fun stuff counselors do.”
And yet, she said, it is still her dream job—and the job that she feels she was meant to do. This summer, she will be managing programs at Wexler Grant Community School and Highville Charter School, with the hopes of expanding to more cities in the state over the next five years.
If Kids Kraze becomes a household name, she said, she’ll know she’s succeeded.
“Dreams do come true, you definitely have to work for what you believe in,” she said. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you no.”
This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the second annual Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Free Public Library. Over eight weeks this spring, ten New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students work with Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and YAJI Program Assistant Melanie Espinal to produce four articles, for each of which they are compensated. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag.