After School
Quality After-School Programs
After-school programs provide safe places and constructive alternatives for children during the critical 2 PM to 6 PM hours when violent juvenile crime peaks. Research from California and across the nation shows that after-school programs can prevent crime, cut drug and alcohol use, reduce teen pregnancy, and increase academic achievement.
California has made a groundbreaking commitment to after-school programs that offer safe, constructive activities to hundreds of thousands of students. In 2002, California voters enacted Proposition 49, which increased funding for the state’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) program for elementary and middle school students by over $400 million, to a total of $550 million. The new funding became available in early 2007 and was in great demand—close to $200 million in applications had to be turned away.
We cannot afford to undo this commitment, which is a rare success story during these difficult times. Our new report, California’s After-School Commitment: Keeping Kids On Track and Out of Trouble, documents this success. Its key findings are:
➢ State- and to a lesser extent federally-funded after-school programs provide safe and enriching activities for more than 400,000 students each day at more than 4,000 elementary, middle and high schools in nearly every county, including two-thirds of all schools in low-income neighborhoods statewide.
➢ Research emerging from California’s after-school programs illustrates how these programs can boost academic achievement, cut dropout rates, and reduce crime. For example, comparable youth who did not participate in the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Oxnard and Port Hueneme were three times more likely to be arrested than those who chose to participate in the program. And after three charter schools in South Central Los Angeles implemented THINK Together’s after-school program for the majority of their students, twice as many students scored at proficient or above on English and math standardized tests.
➢ While California’s investment is substantial, it still falls short of meeting the after-school needs of students and families. More than 2,000 schools in low-income neighborhoods are still without state or federal after-school programs, and more than half of state-funded programs surveyed reported waiting lists.
➢ After-school programs are already taking their share of cuts. The 2008-2009 budget eliminated the $30 million Extended Day/Latchkey child care subsidy program, which offered care before and after school, as well as during the summer. Local budget troubles also have forced many school districts and local governments to cut locally-funded after-school programs. In fact, a UCLA survey found that nearly half of school principals reported reducing or eliminating after-school programs during the recent economic downturn.
AB 2178 (Torlakson) would facilitate evaluation of publicly-funded after-school programs by helping integrate individualized data regarding participation in after-school programs into the state’s longitudinal student database, the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS), which tracks the performance of individual students over time. By connecting after-school data to CALPADS, it will help identify which after-school programs are succeeding and which are not, as well as supporting continuous program improvement at the local level. The bill also encourages school districts to share appropriate data with their after-school providers in a manner consistent with state and federal privacy laws. This data sharing can provide providers with the information necessary to tailor supports for individual students.
SB 898 (Ashburn) would improve access to state after-school funding for rural communitiesby establishing minimum After School Education and Safety grant levels for small schools, provided they meet certain attendance requirements. Schools with enrollment under 75 students often fail to apply for these grants because the current funding formula fails to generate enough revenue to cover the operational costs of an effective program. If enacted, any new grants for small schools would be allocated out of the existing $550 million appropriation for state after-school programs, and no new appropriation would be required.
AB 1876 (Torlakson) would clarify current law and conform long-standing practices by explicitly allowing publicly-funded after-school providers to use their base grants to pay for program-related activities on weekends. It would also help sustain federally-funded after-school programs by giving successful elementary and middle school programs priority when competing for renewal when their five-year grant expires. (Expiring high school programs already have priority.)
After-school programs may rely on the appeal of weekend field trips to encourage youth to improve weekday attendance as a precondition to joining weekend events. The measure ensures that weekend attendance would not be counted towards program attendance goals: program attendance would continue to be determined based on weekday enrollment only.
AB 434 (Block) would help ensure that after-school programs can focus on providing quality, safe and constructive activities for young people. This bill would codify the "direct service" status of site coordinators who spend at least 85% of their time on site, so that their compensation will be considered part of the 85% of after-school funding that must be used for direct services. Without this measure, programs are being forced to waste time and energy—that would be better spent serving students—classifying each and every activity of their site coordinators, whose day-to-day work should be recognized as integral to direct service without the need for additional paperwork.
