Westbrook’s My Place Teen Center, which serves hundreds of at-risk youth, is in danger of losing all its funding from the city.

While My Place Teen Center is a private nonprofit organization, the city has historically provided it annual funding as part of the social-services budget. Things went awry after a recommendation was made this year to include $25,000 in the school budget for the center, in return for the school department using the center during the off-hours for its alternative learning program.

According to both Superintendent of Schools Marc Gousse and teen center Executive Director Donna Dwyer, the plan fell through.

“There was never any guarantee of any funding,” Gousse said Tuesday.

He said that after two meetings and a series of emails with Dwyer, no deal was struck.

The situation is raising questions on how the annual appropriation for one of the city’s most utilized nonprofits could be in peril, though Westbrook Mayor Colleen Hilton said Tuesday that there is still a possibility that the funding will be picked up.

The $25,000 is roughly 5 percent of the center’s $600,000 budget, but its loss means a bigger fundraising burden for the organization.

Gousse said while discussing the possibility of using the teen center’s space for alternative learning classrooms, he asked Dwyer to share data on the center, including the number of students from Westbrook schools using the space regularly.

“Every time we try to suggest a collaboration, she doesn’t want to share data,” he said.

Gousse said he didn’t hear from Dwyer again following their email exchange, and the school department “went down a different road.” He said the department is now allocating the $25,000 to house the program at the Westbrook Community Center.

Gousse and Dwyer both complained about communication problems dealing with the issue. Both told the American Journal that all of their communication on the funding came from their side, and that they struggled to maintain communication with the other.

Dwyer said Tuesday that she is not backing down from her original request of $100,000 in funding from the city. She said when the school department previously used the teen center for programs, it paid to rent the space, even as the center also received funds from the city.

Gousse, she said, “pulled the offer,” adding that she moved on from the discussion in order to concentrate on other fundraising.

“It’s not worth it to me,” she said. “I’m not a city decision-maker, and I just have to keep on moving forward because I have a lot of money to raise and a lot of kids to feed.”

At Westbrook’s Finance Committee meeting Monday, Gousse presented the school department’s $34.1 million budget for fiscal year 2015-16, which, he said, did not include $25,000 for the teen center.

During the final minutes of the meeting, City Councilor Paul Emery made a motion to include $38,000 in the municipal budget for the center, which failed to garner a second. Councilor Mike Sanphy also tried to add $25,000 to the budget, which also failed by a 5-2 vote.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Sanphy said Tuesday about the lack of funding.

Dwyer was not present at the committee meeting Monday. She said she was working at the teen center, which is short-staffed.

Hilton said she and the council were surprised to learn that the funding “had been rejected” by Dwyer.

However, in the February email exchange between Dwyer and Gousse, which was forwarded to the American Journal, Dwyer never rejects the $25,000, instead telling Gousse that in addition to the $25,000 from the school department, she would still be requesting $75,000 from the city.

In the email exchange, Dwyer states that the school department’s offer of $25,000 is “being made to supplant” their total request to social services for $100,000.

“While we certainly understand that you are unable to control any additional city allocation, for your reference, however, we will be pursuing the remainder of our original request with the city,” she said.

In Gousse’s response, he says the $25,000 is not supplanting her original request, and says any further requests for funding is “beyond the scope” of his office. He goes on to say that he is “uncomfortable” with Dwyer’s request, and says he will place the recommendation for funding “on hold until further notice.”

Dwyer said Tuesday she wanted to make it clear that she would still be seeking her original funding request, but was not rejecting the collaboration with the school department.

Deb Shangraw, a member of the teen center’s advisory committee who is also a member of the social-services committee, said Dwyer stated that she would still be seeking further funds from the city because she “didn’t want there to be any confusion that could later be used saying she only requested $25K in the end.”

“In my opinion, there was no reason for Marc to take this tact and pull the funding and not include it as part of his budget. To now say it is for the reason of Donna requesting the full $100K from the School Department is disingenuous and clearly not factual,” Shangraw said.

Gousse said Tuesday that since the emails, there has been no effort by Dwyer to further discuss the funding.

Each year, a social-services committee, made up of Hilton and various other city officials and residents, works to decide on funding levels for each of the 14 nonprofits that make requests. Other organizations include Woodfords Family Services, Visiting Nurses Association, the Westbrook Food Pantry, Home Health Care and the Southern Maine Agency on Aging.

In February, each of the other 13 organizations requested flat funding, with the large majority receiving it. While My Place Teen Center requested $100,000 from the city, the total social services budget recommended by the committee was only about $68,000, including $6,000 in the school budget.

Maria Dorn, the director of community services, who also sits on the social-services committee, said Tuesday that the city struggles with having limited funds to disperse among a large number of social-service agencies that do important work.

“Every year, their needs grow and their funding diminishes, but we’re really supplemental,” she said, stating that the committee tried to “get creative” this year with its approach.

The committee recommended that the school department work with the teen center to establish funding for the educational programs offered there. Hilton said the discussion focused on the need to align the schools with the particular social-service agencies that “are exclusively serving children.”

The committee recommended that $25,000 be allocated to the teen center from the school budget, which is flat funding from this year’s municipal budget.

Dorn, who also directed the teen enter for six years, said the social-services committee tries to “keep emotion out of it, and be practical” when it comes to deciding on funding.

“We fully support the teen center, and we’re going to go back and try to figure this one out, but we can’t be a $100,000-a-year-supporter,” she said.

Shangraw said she’s been advocating for the city to raise its social-services budget to $300,000, and believes $100,000 for the teen center is justified.

“I am appalled that we cannot allocate a minimum of 1 percent of our collective budgets to social services or even just the city budget,” she said Tuesday.

“It’s woefully inadequate, in my opinion,” Dwyer said about the level of social-services funding in Westbrook. She said municipalities such as South Portland and Biddeford have much higher social-services budgets, with a smaller number of organizations.

“Why anyone wouldn’t want to assist the teen center in its endeavors is beyond me,” Dwyer said.

Shangraw said Dwyer “supplied all the documents that Gousse requested,” including financial information requested by the social-services committee.

Hilton said that prior to discussions for next year’s budget, the city informed social-service organizations to request flat funding, saying that during a tight budget year, the city would “at best be able to flat fund them.”

“I think the committee was somewhat disheartened with a request of $100,000, at a time when we’re seeing cuts in social services everywhere and we’re trying to be very frugal,” she said.

John O’Hara, the longest-tenured city councilor, said Tuesday that when the former Mission Possible Teen Center was founded, the organization received seed money to get it up and running, but it was expected that after a few years, the organization would sustain itself.

“It was always looked at as funding to get a start-up organization going,” he said. “It never was intended to be funded for a long period of time by the citizens of the community.”

O’Hara said that while the teen center does “great work,” he won’t support any potential last-minute budget proposal to add funding for the center.

My Place Teen Center receives the majority of its funding through donations, fundraisers and grants. In December, the center received a $325,000 grant from the Next Generation Foundation of Maine. Dwyer announced that the center would use $250,000 to pay off its mortgage on the revamped church property that it bought in 2004, with the remaining $75,000 going toward renovations.

The center was established as Mission Possible Teen Center in 1998, and was renamed My Place Teen Center in 2013, with Dwyer at the helm. The organization offers free, year-round programs for youth ages 10-18. According to its mission, it specializes in youth most at risk, including those who are homeless, food insecure, cognitively delayed, low-income, immigrants and refugees.

On Tuesday, Dwyer said the center receives no state funding, and other than money from the city, receives annual funding from the United Way of Greater Portland. The organization’s operating budget for next year is $607,000, and it serves 506 kids, she said.

Fundraising, said Dwyer, “is a Herculean task for us to undertake given the number of kids we’re serving.”

In October, Dwyer told the American Journal that My Place Teen Center was on track to serve more than 17,000 meals in 2014, up from 14,000 in 2013. That’s 50-70 meals per day, up from 35-40 the previous year. The center was also named an “Agency of Distinction” last year from WCSH-6 and the United Way.

While funding for the center has decreased as the city’s social-services budget has shrunk, the $25,000 it has received in recent years is two or three times the number that any other agency receives.

“We’re certainly supportive of it, as we are with all the other nonprofits in the city that we support,” Hilton said.

But, Hilton said, through the years the organization has rejected a number of ideas and potential collaborative measures with the school department. Both entities often apply for the same grants.

It is still unclear if the teen center will receive any last-minute funding, especially as both budgets are quickly moving ahead to final approval. The Westbrook School Committee is set to give first reading to the fiscal year 2015-16 budget on Wednesday, after the American Journal’s deadline this week.

Hilton said she would be open to revisit the teen center funding, a sentiment that she has forwarded to City Councilor Michael Foley, the chairman of the Finance Committee.

“We don’t want to go from their current funding allocation to zero,” she said. “But there has to be collaboration.”

Foley said he doesn’t expect the City Council to add funding at the last minute.

“It required collaboration, and whether she rejected (the funding) or not, she wasn’t willing to cooperate,” he said Wednesday.

Foley said the budget revisit list is meant as a discussion tool, but My Place Teen Center wasn’t on the agenda, nor was Dwyer present to make a case for the funding. Foley said a month ago, when Gousse presented the school budget, nothing was included, but that no one from the City Council requested to discuss the funding at the finance committee meeting Monday.

Foley said he is fairly confident that if My Place Teen Center had originally requested flat funding from the city, it would have received it.

My Place Teen Center currently has a summer programming fundraiser on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe at www.gofundme.com/pyh5nc.

“We don’t have the funds raised yet,” Dwyer said.

My Place Teen Center is on Main Street in Westbrook. File photo