KITTERY — Priscilla Guy remembers vividly the day a little boy jumped off the school bus and ran through the doors of the Kittery Youth Connection with a big chip on his shoulder.

He stood defiantly before her and refused to sign in. He held his chin in his hand and finally admitted he had been in a fight at school that afternoon.

“He was downright belligerent to me,” Guy recalled recently.

She chose not to press the issue, and the boy ran across the room and spent the next 15 minutes taking his aggression out on a punching bag that hung from the ceiling.

He then went about his business of playing Nintendo and chatting with his friends.

“Can you imagine if he had gone home to an empty house with all of that rage and anger? He beat that bag until his knuckles were red. He told me off a bit and everything was OK,” she said.

While experts across the country tag complicated names to various treatment programs for troubled youth, people in Kittery are taking a more basic approach.

Caring adults and a roomful of interesting stuff.

It was Guy’s dream to provide kids with an alternative to the streets, drugs and violence. In July 1997, the doors opened and today 30 to 40 youths filter into the Kittery Youth Connections center each day after school. On weekends, as many as 50 to 60 youngsters, usually 9 to 15 years old, fill the center for games, activities and dances.

While the emphasis is on fun, there are rules. When kids arrive each day, they sign in and are handed a piece of paper with that day’s chore written on it. It is their part in running the center. In a back room, programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Let’s Talk for violent teens and other support groups are held.

To say the Kittery Youth Connection is a community project would be an understatement. It was started and is operated by the Kittery Chemical Awareness and Prevention group.

The owner of the vacant building that once housed Dan’s Supermarket agreed to lease the building rent-free for the first year; electricians and plumbers from town worked steadily for one year to install electricity and bathrooms; a KCAP member who is the manager of a local restaurant traded a spaghetti dinner for the toilets; the urinal in the boy’s room came from a nearby truck stop that was remodeling; the paint to spruce up the 10,000-square-foot building was donated by a local hardware store; carpenters donated their time to build a stage; a supermarket in town that was doing away with its 1950s-era snack bar donated it to the center.

The 12 computers and laser printer, the walk-in freezer, the rock climbing wall, the four pool tables, the nine TVs (with free, donated cable) the hundreds of Nintendo games, the ping-pong tables, the couches and tables, the pottery wheel and the brand-new kiln — all donated.

The ceiling tiles are covered with folksy art by kids, parents and businesses in town. When Guy needed $4,000 for the ceiling, she raised it by selling tiles and letting buyers decorate them.

Instead of suspending kids for misbehaving, schools send them to the center on evenings and weekends to perform community service, Guy said.

A York County judge, frustrated with parents paying the $100 fine for underage smokers, opted to make kids enroll in the center’s eight-week smokers’ education program and then in the eight-week smoking cessation program — all free of charge.

Guy seems almost overwhelmed with the growth of the Kittery Youth Connection. Now she’d like to provide some sort of residential programs for the troubled youth who fill the center each day.

“It used to be if you had this mountain, there was a village at the top and an ambulance at the bottom to treat the kids who fell off the mountain. We said, `Hey why don’t we build a big fence around the village to catch those kids before they fall,”‘ said Guy.