Salinas gang prevention program is effective, yet unfunded.

Bob Reyes of the Monterey County Probation Department pulls out a one-sided form describing a Salinas elementary student. Boxes are checked for truancy, failing grades and family problems. The referral is typical of what comes across Reyes’ desk at the Silver Star Resource Center, a multi-agency gang prevention and intervention program in Salinas.

Most of the referred students are in middle school and are missing classes, but are not yet hardened gang members. Families referred to the center can access a network of drug, gang and family counselors as well as teachers and psychiatrists. The support base is meant to steer youth back into the classroom and away from gang recruiters.

“To me it’s kind of getting to them before the gangs do,” Reyes says.

But the county’s only one-stop shop for troubled youth is in financial limbo. Its agencies are awaiting word on whether they will be funded through a federal appropriations bill. Silver Star has a $500,000 allocation in the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill. But the bill has been stalled by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives because it has a federal minimum wage increase attached to it, says Rochelle Dornatt, chief of staff for US Rep. Sam Farr, who secured the program’s first year of funding.

By the Weekly’s deadline, legislators were expected to extend temporary funding for federal health and education agencies through Dec. 8. For now, special projects like Silver Star included in the approximately $142 billion bill will have to keep waiting, Dornatt says.