Weekly Media Roundup: September 10, 2025

The Boys & Girls Club of South County Continues To Impact Local Kids, Eagle & Times (California)

Through partnerships with local business and schools, the Boys & Girls Club of South County in California provides students a variety of engaging activities in its afterschool program, including San Diego Football Club clinics, reading partner programs with Amazon, workforce skills development career days, cultural celebrations, and volunteer opportunities for high school students. “The staff gets creative and brings something new and innovative, and incorporates it with the programs. I’m very proud of all our staff for what we do here,” CEO Stephanie James told the Eagle & Times. The Club serves more than 2,000 children each year.

Large Crowds of Teens Prompt City Leaders to Call for More After-School Programs, News 12 (New York)

Spurred on by viral social media posts, hundreds of teenagers from local schools flooded the streets surrounding the Barclays Center and the Atlantic Terminal Mall in Brooklyn last week after school let out, disrupting traffic and leading to altercations. “It’s a beautiful day, kids should be having fun outside with their friends. But this is one of the most dangerous intersections, and this is not the place to do it,” New York City Council Member Crystal Hudson told News 12. Hudson noted the need for more afterschool programs for teenagers, providing them safe spaces to direct their energy and interests instead of leaving them unsupervised in the streets. 

Expanding Horizons, Essential Relationships: The Evidence of Afterschool Impacts, Youth Today

Students who participate in Horizons out-of-school time programs for at least four summers outperform their peers in math and science and are less likely to be chronically absent, according to a third-party evaluation study funded by the New York Life Foundation and the Scripps Family Fund for Education and the Arts. In a recent guest column for Youth Today, Horizons Senior Vice President Dara Rose draws connections between this evaluation and a new 26-year longitudinal study that illuminates the transformative potential of afterschool. “As social beings, we learn and grow in the context of relationships — and when these are paired with high quality learning and leadership opportunities, real transformation happens. This is a hallmark of high-quality out-of-school times programs everywhere,” Rose writes.

At this Green Bay Summer School for New Immigrants, Cultural Connection is the Point, Green Bay Press Gazette (Wisconsin)

Students who recently immigrated from Ukraine, Somalia and beyond joined Community Services Agency’s (COMSA) summer learning program this year, where they connected across cultures, practiced their English language and literacy skills, and took part in fun, educational activities such as field trips to the farmer’s market. During the school year, COMSA offers an afterschool program focused on homework help and social-emotional learning. A key goal of the program is to help students stay connected to their cultures while adapting and finding belonging in their new community. “That’s not something that we can be able to do in one day or two days,” Said Hassan, cofounder and executive director, told the Green Bay Press Gazette. “It’s got to be an injection of that community system.”