When Nikki Leopold went to see about enrolling her daughter Kristin, 2½, at Island Kids, she found the venerable playschool in dire straits, rather like a teeter-totter tottering on its last teeter. Instead of enrolling Kristin, Leopold herself signed on, volunteering her time and her 15 years of expertise in rejuvenating frayed non-profit institutions.

The result can be seen starting July 11, when an eight-week summer camp begins for children ages 7-12, along with various music and dance classes designed to shake the groove thing of children, teens, and parents too.

"My vision for Island Kids – and I’ve been thinking about it for some time – is that it could be a much bigger community resource," says Leopold, the unpaid executive director of the group that began with a handful of social-network-starved parents back in 1981. It attained non-profit status in 1994.

Leopold sees Island Kids as a place that can grow with the growing needs of the community, "where we could do an outreach to single parents and younger parents between 18 and 25 who may need their own kind of support."

But first, there’s a crisis in need of immediate attention. Leopold and a reporter for The Main Street WIRE are seated at a miniature table on pint-sized chairs to discuss the future of Island Kids, but Anika, 2 years and 3 months, armed with a tube of day-glo Play-Doh, has perceived an injustice. She is wailing as only a child can wail when she believes someone is sitting in the very chair that makes her heart sing.

"You sit in my chair!" sobs Anika, her Play-Doh drooping from one hand that has been raised to the heavens in apparent supplication.

Like any good executive director (and babysitter), Leopold rushes to the rescue, finding Anika another chair. The tears dry like magic. Once seated, however, Anika realizes just how insanely boring and unproductive it is to sit among adults, and off she runs to take a phone off the hook so that, eventually, an endless phone-off-the-hook! signal will echo through the play area of 536 Main Street.

Island Kids is located on the ground floor of that address, in the courtyard behind the now-defunct pizza place. The large space is donated by Roosevelt Island Housing Management, and includes a blue-carpeted play area where the main classes are held, a smaller room for arts and crafts, and a tiny kitchen that could conceivably be expanded with modest renovation into a teaching kitchen. There’s already a kiln there, an artifact from the days when Island Kids offered pottery classes.

Leopold’s plans for the new Island Kids include an array of support groups, such as one for sufferers of post-partum depression, and a speakers’ program where experts will expound on such hot-button topics as learning disabilities. "I’m thinking of other groups I know, like Families First, in Brooklyn, that have a much larger vision," says Leopold. "That’s what we’re hoping to accomplish in the next year. It’s a lot."

A lot, yes, considering the state of the group’s finances. When Leopold joined in May, Island Kids was running on fumes. The only income came from a single music class whose tuition barely covered the cost of Anika’s Play-Doh.

"We were left with a dire financial situation, and right now, we’re doing crisis management," says Leopold.

When she says "we," she refers to the new board of directors she’s put together, which includes herself, two former board members, and two mothers, one of whom has a 15-year-old daughter who attended Island Kids back in the project’s heyday. "A big part of what we’re going to be doing is fund-raising. We’re just about to apply to RIOC for public-purpose funds, and we’ve contacted different foundations, hoping they’ll help us with grants." (At Thursday morning’s RIOC Board meeting, Leopold watched as the chair of the RIOC Board’s Public Purpose Funds Committee listed her $75,500 proposal as one of two the Board will consider soon, mentioning it favorably.)

The group needs publicity, too. Registration forms for the summer program, which includes music, dance, and guitar lessons for older age groups and parents, are available at Starbucks and the lobbies of 555 and 625 Main Street and 10 River Road. But leaflets and ads are expensive, the posters that have been put up on Main Street have largely been torn down, and the trickle of available cash needs to go toward sprucing up the physical space, laying in supplies, and paying the salaries of the seven or so new teachers on staff for summer and fall.

Leopold is a former Island kid herself: she moved here with her family in 1976, then moved back here again when she was grown with children. She also runs the non-profit Midtown Pregnancy Support Center in Manhattan. In her 15 years of experience with non-profit organizations, Leopold has seen how easily such organizations can founder due to lack of funds and the burn-out factor inherent in a volunteer workforce. (She hopes someday that Island Kids will be able to pay her a stipend.)

But she says she’s dedicated to helping breathe new life into something she sees as essential for the Island.

"This was a great place to grow up. I went to school on the Island, and I have a real attachment personally to the community," she says. "Island Kids adds to the great things the Island has to offer. It provides an opportunity for people who’ve been here a long time, and also for people moving here from Manhattan who are used to convenience and having things at their fingertips. They don’t have to run into the City to go to Gymboree, which charges double what we do. And this adds to that small-town feeling."

As an insider, Leopold is also sensitive to the subtleties of the local scene. For instance, although her summer program offers belly-dancing, African dance, aerobics, and yoga, she is determined that the fall schedule not compete with or undermine the (mostly dance) classes offered by the neighboring Main Street Theater & Dance Alliance, which welcomes children starting at age 2 ½.

In any case, her fall schedule isn’t yet set in stone. Plans are for playgroups in Spanish, bilingual music classes, "creative play," and cooking classes for children 5 and up. The cooking classes will be taught by a former food editor of Woman’s Day Magazine who already has her eye on knocking down the wall that separates the kitchen from the main room, and also, it seems, walls off her dream of a grand teaching kitchen. Other classes include a mother-daughter book club, and a workshop devoted to making a gingerbread house.

In the beginning, Island Kids was "a group of parents who just wanted to socialize, who wanted to get together with other mothers and have their kids play with each other. It was a way to build community. Basically, it was a parenting playgroup," says Leopold.

She feels this paved the way for an Island Kids that evolves with community needs, where parents and teens can take yoga together (such a class is already on the summer schedule), and where there will be a group solely for fathers with their babies – a far cry from a mere six years ago, when The Main Street WIRE noted the Big News that Island Kids had its first stay-at-home dad show up; the former construction worker created a big stir.

One thing Island Kids will not have is quiet. Leopold interrupts the interview, cocks her head to one side, and registers that concern common to all mothers: "It’s a little too quiet." She runs to check on her daughter and playmate Anika. "Girls? Girls?" There’s a rising note of panic in Leopold’s voice, then … "Oh, okay. You’re okay."

Now, boys and girls, it’s time for the part of the day we all love, when the WIRE reporter attempts to take a photo of two little girls happily at play on a blue-and-yellow plastic slide. Kristin climbs to the top, her gorgeous eyes big and trusting, her pretty face framed just so, and … bursts into tears.

"No picture! No!" she frets.

"Wouldn’t you like a nice picture of you in the newspaper?" cajoles the reporter.

"No!" A siren-like sound of distress emerges that is likely to alarm pedestrians on Main Street.

Anyway, Anika is anxious to be photographed. She poses perfectly … for a millisecond. Then she runs off to her next appointment with a pink, stuffed thing that was once an identifiable animal.

There are no usable photos to be had today, but then, the all-new Island Kids is still in its infancy. You have to give it time.

For more information on the Island Kids summer program, call Nikki Leopold at 212-317-1216.