Weekly Media Roundup: July 5, 2023

City’s Teen After-School Programs Face 50% Cut in Funding, San Francisco Examiner (California)

Afterschool program directors at 11 high schools are urging the Board of Education and the San Francisco Unified School District to find a way to avoid cutting their city funding in half this fall. “Children and teenagers being in a positive, social group or setting that is outside of school is really important for their socioemotional health,” Maria Su, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families told the San Francisco Examiner. “There, they can test out social interactions with each other in a structured environment, in a place where it can be okay to fail … [Afterschool programs help teens] expand their art or music interests or gain an opportunity to explore career interests.”

Summer Camp Gives Middle Schoolers a Sneak Peek Into Tech School - Here's What They Did, The Norwich Bulletin (Connecticut)

At the Summer Techno Camp in Norwich, Connecticut, rising seventh and eighth grade students are cooking Italian feasts, creating metal sculptures out of ductwork, and exploring career opportunities in the health technology field. “There’s a lot of free time in the summer, so it provides a little structure,” Norwich Tech Career Pathways Supervisor Adam Lachendro told the Norwich Bulletin. “It gets them hands-on and doing different activities they’d never try or do.” The summer program is an extension of Norwich Tech Career Pathways’ fall and spring programs, which offer trade school learning opportunities to high schoolers.

Kids’ Science Café in Magdalena Is Cooking Up Fun and Learning, El Defensor Chieftain (New Mexico)

At the Kids’ Science Café in Magdalena, parking is only for future astronauts, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Tuskegee Airmen support the aviation camp, and students launch high-altitude balloons at the geoscience camp run in conjunction with New Mexico Tech’s Langmuir Laboratory. The afterschool and summer learning program serves students ages 5 – 12, plus 13- to 17-year-olds at the teen café. It is run by Jim Sauer, who says, “We’re finishing our fourth year with this program and starting our fifth in October. I’m a retired educator, retired military, and one day I’ll retire from this too. We’ve got the only child-centered observatory in the United States out back. We teach kids to fly. The teams are working with this equipment back here; we use it to study lightning.”

Report: 3,300 More Childcare Slots Needed, Wilkes Journal-Patriot (North Carolina)

There were fewer afterschool programs available in Wilkes, North Carolina in 2022 than in 2007, and 2,480 afterschool and summer program slots are needed to help working families now, according to a new Wilkes County childcare taskforce report. “High quality, affordable and accessible childcare is both a moral and economic requirement to return Wilkes to the ranks of a growing, thriving community. It is available to us if we are willing to work for it,” Lee Herring, president of the Herring Foundation, told the Wilkes Journal-Patriot. The report cites staffing shortages, increased operational costs, and costly childcare fees as key barriers that should be addressed.