Building a strong foundation

ESLAsC began after adult participants in the Columbus State Community College’s Basic English classes voiced a need for similar opportunities for the youth in the community. With a Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) grant, the college was able to open seven sites located within low-income housing communities in Columbus. However, starting out fast wasn’t the best course of action for ESLAsC.

 “In Columbus, there have been a lot of organizations that will go to low-income or immigrant communities and try to get them to sign up for afterschool programming but then not offer any programming. There was a lot of distrust initially,” explained Plagenz. “So we started off really big and had to whittle back down because there wasn't a lot of structure, or oversight—a little bit of too big and too fast. […]There wasn't a lot of community building or relationship building to get the trust of the communities.”

According to Plagenz, ESLAsC responded by adjusting their model. ESLAsC hired local community members and elders, as well as instituted greater oversight of their programs, which includes six months to a year’s worth of research on a community needs assessment.

“Our model today is that we work with the district and the apartment complexes where the families reside and do an in-depth evaluation on the need of the community,” Plagenz said. “We look at what barriers there are and evaluate things like, are there going to be transportation issues? Are there other afterschool options? What age group does the community want us to serve? We will meet with family members, local social organizations or cultural organizations, and include them in planning. Usually they are the ones that come to us and say they want the afterschool program, but we still go through that six month to a year process of evaluation.”

Building a strong relationship

One thing that we valued in the ESLAsC program was their multi-tiered approach to support their students in and out of school. The program’s staff, including their site specialists and tutors, take time out of each week to be in the schools that their students attend.

“Our relationships with our kids are paramount, that is our most important thing,” Plagenz said. “But just as important is our relationship with the parents, our school staff, students’ teachers, our tutors, everyone. […] This bridge between afterschool and the classroom really helps our tutors know what our kids are learning during the day.”

Plagenz credits the strong relationship between the program’s providers and participants to ESLAsC staff’s level of investment and the program’s emphasis on hiring staff who are passionate about the work they do.

“I think [the students] feel cared about, and they feel like they are being held accountable. We work to be very consistent,” Plagenz explained. “We have high expectations and there is a feeling that they belong to something. We value their input, them, and their culture. In the end, it is their program.”

Building a strong community

For ESLAsC, being a support for students means going above and beyond by involving the whole family. According to Plagenz, the program staff serve as a bridge between a child’s parents and his or her school.

“If there is an event at the school we make the phone calls to each family asking them to come, following up again, and then we make sure that we are at every school event,” Plagenz said. “There have even been instances where we pay for a bus and take parents to the school event—whether we are watching younger children, or we are working at the event, we are there. A lot of our staff also serve as interpreters for parent teacher conferences.”

In addition to supporting the children in the program, ESLAsC also provides a variety of services for the parents, including adult ESL classes and sewing classes, and helping wherever is needed in the community.

“We do home visits, we do social services referrals, and we partner with the local Columbus public health each year where parents and kids can come get vaccinated for the flu,” Plagenz said of their relationship with the program’s families. “If a parent is having trouble with an electric bill, we have helped make those appointments, we have taken parents and kids to doctor’s appointments and acted as translators. If a parent is reaching out to us for something, we are not going to say ‘no’ and drop the ball, and if we can’t do it we are going to make sure that they get to some place or someone that can.”

To learn more about Columbus State Community College’s ESLAsC, check out their program spotlight!

In a press release from Fight Crime, Invest in Kids, the group of sheriffs, police chiefs, and prosecutors congratulated the Senate on S. 860. “For 91 percent of juveniles facing custody, diversion to local, effective youth programs reduced the rate of re-offending more than placement in juvenile facilities.” The release continued, “Because they cut recidivism, the interventions can also save the public between $6,000 and $26,000 per youth served, a stark contrast to the $88,000 average cost of one year for one youth in juvenile custody.”

Updates to the legislation have broad, bipartisan support. To complete the reauthorization process, the House and Senate must now form a conference committee to agree upon one final version of the bill when they return to work in September. As the conference process may encounter challenges around provisions such as the valid court order, advocates are keeping up the drum beat to move the reauthorization bills through into law.

Currently, the House version (H.R. 1809) includes an explicit mention of afterschool programs and mentoring as an evidence-based use of prevention funding which would be nice to see in any final version of the bill.

Afterschool programs play an important role in providing youth with the safe spaces, caring adults, and social and emotional supports that can keep them focused on their long term success. For example, the city of Athens, Georgia in collaboration with the University of Georgia School of Social Work recently concluded task force survey on gang prevention wherein parents and youth placed afterschool/ youth development programs high on their list of prevention focused opportunities. You can read the full article here.

Secondly, additional work needs to be done to define key indicators for the program to support efforts to monitor the participation and progress of enrolled youth and inform efforts to make targeted refinements to programming to enhance quality and effectiveness (purpose #2). For example, our sense is that indicators could be crafted to answer the following three questions:

1. To what extent are centers retaining youth in 21st CCLC programming, both during the span of the school year and across school years? From our statewide evaluation work, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that youth benefit more from 21st CCLC programming the more they participate. Keeping youth enrolled in programming is linked both to the underlying quality of a center’s activities and ensuring that youth have access to developmentally appropriate activities as they get older that keep them interested and engaged in program activities.
2. To what extent are youth reporting having positive experiences in 21st CCLC programs? We consider it vital for programs to understand the subjective experiences youth have while participating in programming and use this information to enhance program offerings to ensure a “goodness of fit” between where youth are and what learning supports and opportunities the program is providing. Youth surveys are primarily used to obtain these types of data.
3. To what extent are youth demonstrating improvement on those outcomes a center is specifically attempting to impact through the provision of intentional programming aligned with those specific outcomes? This question is predicated on the belief that all centers should not be expected to positively impact the full array of school-related outcomes we typically examine when attempting to assess program impact. Rather, federal, state, and local stakeholders and funders should be looking for improvement in those specific areas targeted explicitly by center goals and objectives and the manner in which center staff go about designing and delivering aligned activities meant to support the positive development of youth.

We also would advocate for the collection and use of these data using a quality improvement, as opposed to an accountability, framework. The focus here should be on using data to enhance program implementation, as opposed to making summative judgments about efficacy or impact.

Assessing program impact represents the final way of looking at 21st CCLC data (purpose #3). In this instance, the focus should be on using rigorous quasi-experimental designs to support making causal inferences about how participation in 21st CCLC programming may be having a positive impact on participating youth. Here, we would like to see improvement in two areas: (1) enhancing the rigor of evaluation efforts and (2) improving on the measurement of outcomes that are especially likely to be impacted through 21st CCLC participation.

In terms of rigor, if we are trying to make causal inferences on the impact of 21st CCLC, we need to make sure we are using research designs that will support these inferences. In all the statewide 21st CCLC evaluations completed by AIR, each of the analyses undertaken to assess the relationship between regular program participation and youth outcomes compared youth participating in programming for 60 days or more during the school year with a similar group of youth from the same schools who did not participate in programming. In order to ensure the participating and non-participating groups were as similar as possible, we used an approach called propensity score matching to create the non-participant comparison group. Given that youth were not randomly assigned to participate in programming or not, there is always the concern that youth who did opt to participate differed in important ways from youth who did not enroll in programming. That is, potential program effects could be driven more by existing differences between the groups at baseline than a true relationship between program participation and youth outcomes. The goal in using propensity score matching was to mitigate this selection bias when estimating potential program effects by accounting for preexisting differences between youth who attended the program regularly and those who did not. As a result, these analyses helped us to isolate the potential effect participation in 21st CCLC had on youth outcomes.

Efforts to evaluate the impact of 21st CCLC should increasingly try to employ these types of designs, particularly at the state-level where there additional evaluation resources are available to support these types of analyses. In addition, very little work has been done to understand the longitudinal effects of 21st CCLC participation on the educational and career trajectories of participating youth. More work needs to be done in this area as well.

Finally, there is a great opportunity to improve upon how we are measuring youth outcomes supported by 21st CCLC participation. When we talk with center coordinators about how youth benefit from participating in the program, quite often their responses can be classified as falling in one of the following categories:

• Belonging/Mattering
  • Creating a sense of belonging and connectedness for participating youth through positive and supportive relationships
  • Supporting the development of positive interpersonal skills
• Promoting Youth Agency
  • Supporting the development of positive mindsets and beliefs that participating youth can succeed through effort , including promoting confidence and a sense of self-efficacy
  • Cultivating new cognitive tools, like strategic thinking, by being afforded the opportunity to take ownership in the learning process through approaches like project-based and inquiry-based learning
• Interest Development
  • Providing opportunities to participating youth to experience and do new things
  • Discovering new areas of interest and passion (e.g., STEM, the Arts, etc.)
• Self-Management
  • Developing skills to manage cognition, behavior, and emotion
• Sense of Purpose
  • Supporting the understanding of why what youth do with their lives matters

Unfortunately, many of these areas are currently going unmeasured, leading to a gaping hole in our understanding of how 21st CCLC programming is truly impacting participating youth. Our sense is that if we really want to understand how 21st CCLC may be impacting youth, we need to dedicate some additional effort to examining these types of outcomes. However, before states and grantees widely pursue efforts to measure these types of program outcomes, they should wait for the research community to provide more concrete recommendations regarding which skills, beliefs, and attitudes can be reliably measured (and under what conditions), and what protections need to be in place to ensure youth are not adversely impacted by participating in these measurement efforts.

 The issue brief demonstrates the benefits of blending STEM with healthy eating and physical activity in OST:

• Establishing a diverse and heathy workforce
• Fostering community responsibility and citizen science
• Encouraging partnerships between schools and afterschool
• Meeting the needs of families, schools, and communities

The brief explores how the blend of STEM with wellness can contribute to a more equitable socioeconomic future for all youth and discusses different collaborative opportunities for schools, community centers, and afterschool programs to combine STEM and wellness priorities. Additionally, the brief demonstrates how implementing STEM and wellness in a complementary manner counters the challenge of competing priorities and limited resources as schools and organizations are continuously challenged to do more with less.

Afterschool providers are one of the players being called to action to use the brief’s sample of practical resources to overcome the challenges of adopting the blended model of STEM and wellness. You can start the process by adopting the NAA HEPA Standards for OST and by using the information in the brief as an advocacy tool. The brief suggests accessing, investigating, and sharing at least two of the resources and program models listed on the final pages of the brief.

By taking these action steps, you can become a key player in integrating STEM and wellness. When someone asks, “Would you rather teach your kids code or have them run a 5K?” you can reply, “Both!”

Eligibility requirements: U.S. schools, nature centers, and other non-profit places of learning from preschool through high school, including houses of worship

Deadline: October 15, 2017

How to apply: Applicants must submit an application and cover letter to the Lorrie Otto Seeds for Education Fund. Application packages must include organization contact information, contact information for project coordinator, and a detailed project description including a budget proposal, proposed site description, educational use of area, and project preparation details. Applications may be submitted electronically.

Tip: Seeds for Education places a strong emphasis on hands-on learning and working to promote native habitat environments. Different criteria of habitats can be found on their website. 

Programs like Girls on the Run are working to get their students up and running (literally). The Girls on the Run curriculum teaches girls important life skills through running to motivate and inspire girls to live healthier and more active lives. A 2014 evaluation indicated that 90 percent of participants from reporting programs were able to complete a 5K race at the end of the Girls on the Run season.

When looking at students that participate in afterschool programs nationwide, 76 percent of parents say that their child gets at least 30 minutes of physical activity during a typical day in their afterschool program, and 27 percent report that their child gets at least an hour of physical activity. In short, afterschool is keeping kids active.

Making the grade

Without regard to an applicants’ level of education, many military applicants fail to score high enough on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) to enlist in the military. A report from the Education Trust (2010) showed that almost a quarter (23 percent) of test-takers failed to achieve the qualifying score.

So, why are so many young adults failing the AFQT? According the America Unprepared, the academic preparedness necessary to graduate high school and pass the Qualification Test starts even before pre-k. Nearly two-thirds of American children are not reading proficient by the 4^th grade, and nearly 20 percent do not complete high school in four years. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of the high school achievement gap between students from low and high income families is present at kindergarten entry.

Luckily, afterschool programs have a history of supporting students academically and closing the achievement gap. Studies have shown that close to 1 in 2 students who regularly attend a 21^st Century Community Learning Center program improved their math and language arts grades, nearly 2 in 3 students improved their homework completion and class participation, and close to 3 in 5 students improved their behavior in class.

In addition to Community Learning Centers, programs like the YMCA High School Youth Institute serve low-income and urban communities to help their students improve their academic performance. An evaluation of the YMCA High School Youth Institute showed that participating students made greater gains in their GPAs and their English language arts and math standardized test scores than their non-participating peers.

Safe and supervised

More than 15 million students are alone and unsupervised between the hours of 3 and 6 p.m. This block of time is when students experiment with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and when juvenile crime peaks. With the military’s stringent requirements for enlistment, a criminal record can be an immediate disqualifier from service.

Afterschool programs keep kids safe and busy in those crucial afternoon hours. According to our national parent survey, 73 percent of parents agree that afterschool programs reduce the likelihood that youth will engage in risky behaviors.

A prime example is Chicago’s Afterschool Matters program, which uses a nationally recognized apprenticeship model to keep their students engaged, employed, and excited for their futures. In 2011, Afterschool Matters reported that participants engaged in risky behaviors, such as using or selling drugs and taking part in gang activity, at a much lower rate than their non-participating peers.

Afterschool has the proven power to help students stay healthy, academically engaged, and out of trouble. Ensuring that kids are equipped to meet the high standards for military service creates generation that’s ready for any path in life, whether as a civilian or a soldier.