Event Connects After-School Programs with Colleges (Youth Today)
Students from the Brooklyn afterschool program Stoked and other local programs attended a college fair to network with recruiters, meet with college admissions counselors and receive plenty of help in planning their academic futures. Stoked is a program established to serve, prepare and empower underserved youth more than they would be in a traditional classroom setting, especially minority students and students from other marginalized groups. “That right fit makes a difference. The idea is to bring together ‘all the things that a young person needs to have to be successful,’” Alison Overseth, executive director of Partnership for Afterschool Education, told Youth Today.
In Minnesota and across the country, cuts in local and federal funding for afterschool programs have left many children with nowhere to go once school is out. Youth centers, foundations and school systems, faced with increasingly-stretched budgets, are consolidating these programs or simply shutting them down altogether, leaving working parents with no place to keep their children safe and well-fed while they work. “We know that youth spend 2,000 hours a year not in school and not sleeping,” Afterschool Ambassador Jenny Wright Collins, executive director of the University YMCA and Beacons Network, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “That is the equivalent of a full-time job to fill with opportunities for learning — or not.”
Speaker Program Links Recovering Addicts, At-Risk Kids (Portland Press-Herald, Maine)
The Boys and Girls Club of Augusta, Maine is bringing patients recovering from opioid addiction into the classroom to teach students about the dangers of opioid misuse and to answer any questions students may have about abuse and how to stay away from opioid. Physician Roy Miller started the program hoping it would help set youths down a safer, healthier path. “It’s easier to keep them from becoming addicts than to treat them on the other side,” Miller told the Portland Press-Herald.
At an afterschool program in Redlands, disadvantaged youths are spending their afternoons learning everything from puppeteering to ceramics to organic gardening. The Burrage Buddies program, held twice a week at the Burrage Mansion, brings in volunteers to work with the students and teach them skills they may never have the opportunity to learn elsewhere. “A lot of my kids don’t get exposure to these types of things in other ways, like people don’t have time to teach them cooking, and the things that they do cook – they’re not making pastries or chicken pot pies,” Abby Anaya, Oxford program director with after-school program Micah House, told the Redlands Daily Facts.