Rural Communities Across the United States Need Additional Learning Opportunities

The Center for American Progress issued a new report this month - Additional Learning Opportunities in Rural Areas. Written by Roy Forbes, this report focuses on the needs, challenges and opportunities facing young people in rural America. Forbes' research revealed that students who live in rural areas are more at risk of dropping out of high school and perform less well on academic tests.

The natural inclination to expand learning opportunities, an effort being implemented in urban and suburban communities, is more challenging in rural communities due to lack of resources among other factors.

Structured Reading Programs After School Can Have an Impact if Implemented Properly

A study recently released by Aridce Hartry, Robert Fitzgerald, and Kristie Porter profiled the opportunities and challenges in providing structured afterschool reading programs for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Their work focused on this group of students who were low-performing and structured reading programs after school was thought to be an effective strategy to help increase their literacy skills. Not surprisingly, the impact of this strategy was linked to how effectively it was being implemented.

Read their full article on-line courtesy of Red Orbit that was posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008.

The Afterschool Investments Project Provides New Resources

The Afterschool Investments Project is funded by the Child Care and Development Fund through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and provides a series of tools and information to help states assess their school age child care efforts.

State Child Care Subsidy Administration Policies Audio Conference
On January 31, 2008, the Afterschool Investments project held an audio conference for State and Regional Office staff on subsidy administration policies for school-age care, with a focus on state strategies for facilitating transitions between the regular school year and school breaks. This event was based on a new strategy brief released by Afterschool Investments. Please click here for more information about this event.

Using Quality Rating Systems to Promote Quality in Afterschool Programs
Executive Summary: Most tiered quality ratings systems were designed with early care providers in mind, but are readily adaptable to providers that care for school-age children. For those providers who only serve school-age children, adapting the ratings systems is more challenging. This brief outlines issues in adapting tiered quality ratings for those caring for school-age children; offers suggestions for adaptations; and provides examples of innovative solutions that states are proposing.

School-Age Children in Regulated Family Child Care Settings
This publication explores the role of licensed family child care providers in caring for school-age children. It outlines steps that states can take to better support these providers in serving school-age or mixed-age groups and addresses information gaps in the field where further research is needed.

Building Professional Development Systems for the Afterschool Field
Executive Summary: This publication provides a snapshot of state and local approaches to building professional development systems for school-age care professionals, highlighting the shared challenges these systems face and the common components of sustainable professional development systems.

State Child Care Subsidy Administration Policies for School-Age Care
This strategy brief examines subsidy administration policies and practices with regard to how they promote access to care for school-age children. It explores how states establish provider reimbursement rates for school-age care, determine co-payments for families with children in school, and develop strategies to facilitate the transitions between part-time care during the school year and full-time care during school and summer breaks.

State Afterschool Profiles
These annually updated profiles provide a snapshot of the “state of afterschool" in every state as well as an opportunity to compare afterschool activities across the country. Profiles highlight key data and descriptions of the afterschool landscape, which include a range of out-of-school time programming that can occur before and after school, on weekends, and during summer months. They are designed to serve as a resource for policymakers, administrators, and providers. Please click here for updated profiles for all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

Federal Resources for Afterschool Providers
This resource list offers a sample of information available on the Afterschool.gov website, including tips on starting and operating an afterschool program, accessing resources for program funding and financing, delivering fun and innovative curriculum and activities, and addressing issues facing America's youth.

Source: The Afterschool Investments Project website

NIOST Publishes 2008 Fact Sheet

The National Institute on Out -of-School Time (NIOST) has published their 2008 Fact Sheet called Making the Case: A 2008 Fact Sheet on Children and Youth In Out-of-School Time. This fact sheet is chock full of information about the impact of afterschool and out-of-school time programs upon the lives of children and youth, the continuing need for programs, characteristics of the workforce among other key themes.

This easy to read fact sheet can be a valuable tool when you are preparing your presentations, grants, and other reports.

Addressing Loss of Learning Over the Summer

Dr. Ruth Peters, a contributor to MSNBC, talks about the best ways for parents to prevent the loss of learning for their children over the summer months. Research indicates that students can lose up to two months of knowledge over the summer and that loss is even greater for low-income students. Click here for the article and video about this important topic.

Harvard Family Research Project Publishes New Issue Brief

A new issue brief from the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) highlights ten years of research demonstrating the value of afterschool programs, and poses a series of forward-looking questions for program providers.

"After School Programs in the 21st Century: Their Potential and What It Takes to Achieve It," by Priscilla M.D. Little, Christopher Wimer and Heather B. Weiss is the tenth in HFRP's series of issue briefs covering a variety of topics related to afterschool research and evaluations. It highlights key research on afterschool programs' impact on academic success; social and emotional development; drug, alcohol and sex prevention; and health and wellness.

The brief identifies key building blocks for program success, including quality programming, sustained participation, partnerships with schools and community organizations, family participation and more. It concludes by framing a series of questions for the afterschool community. Among them: how to ensure that effective afterschool practices are broadly implemented, and how programs can work with schools and community partners to "ensure a complementary array of learning and developmental supports."

The brief is part of HFRP's "Issues and Opportunities in Out-of-School Time Evaluation" series.

Reprinted from the Afterschool Alliance.

Afterschool and Family Involvement

Last month, the Afterschool Alliance issued a new Issue Brief, Afterschool: Supporting Family Involvement in Schools that talks about the natural link afterschool programs provides to parents. Research indicates that parental involvement makes a real difference in how their children perform in school. Check it out!

Playground games boost self control

Leading research by Dr. Adele Diamond, reveals that playground games helps children gain skills such as "executive control" which helps them to think twice before they make a decision. Executive control also helps young people make conscious and deliberate choices and improve working memory. Working memory is what is needed when solving math problems for example. "You need these kinds of skills in all facets of your life," said Adele Diamond, co-author of the study that appeared last November in the journal Science. This research shows that executive control are predictors of future success in school and IQ tests. Researchers claim that these kinds of skills can be taught like academic skills and may be a tool to help teachers work with children who may be considered hyperactive.

After-school programs can increase physical activity of adolescent girls

Afterschool programs can modestly increase the amount of physical activity among girls in middle school, according to new results from the Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG), a multiple site, community based study supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health.

Results are published in the article, "Promoting Physical Activity in Middle School Girls," in the March issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study found that programs which linked schools in 6 geographic regions of the U.S. with community partners (such as the YMCA or YWCA, local health clubs, and community recreation centers) increased time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity among the middle-school female students by about 2 minutes per day, or 80 calories a week. This finding occurred after three years of the intervention but not after two years. Physical activity was measured using accelerometers (a device for measuring the acceleration of motion), rather than self-reported. The authors write that results suggest this improved level of activity could prevent excess weight gain of about 2 pounds per year (or 0.82 kg per year), which, if sustained, could prevent a girl from becoming overweight as a teenager or adult.

In addition, TAAG showed a reduction of 8.2 minutes of sedentary behavior in girls in the intervention schools. Furthermore, the best results were seen in programs offered between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays, which suggest that afterschool programs are more effective than programs offered at other times, such as morning weekdays and weekends. The study results support the need for schools and community programs to work together to provide opportunities for physical activity programs in afterschool settings.

Researchers have found that as youth, especially girls, become adolescents, their level of physical activity decreases, putting them at risk for becoming overweight.

Listing courtesy of EurekAlert!

New Afterschool Research Show Programs Work

The California Afterschool Network featured the latest studies of two very distinguished researchers at one of their forums in January 2008. Denise Huang, co-author of The Long-Term Effects of After-School Programming on Educational Adjustment and Juvenile Crime: A Study of the LA’s BEST After-School Program and Deborah Vandell, author of Outcomes Linked to High-Quality Afterschool Programs: Longitudinal Findings from the Study of Promising Afterschool Programs presented their work.

The highlighted links provide access to their PowerPoint presentations and their research.

New Study Shows Afterschool Programs Work

The Promising Afterschool Programs study, released in October by scholars Deborah Lowe Vandell and Kim M. Pierce of the University of California-Irvine, and Elizabeth R. Reisner of Policy Studies Associates, examined 35 afterschool programs serving nearly 3,000 low-income students across the nation. What united the programs was that they were all judged by the researchers to be of “high quality.” Specifically, before and during the period of the study, programs evidenced supportive relationships between staff and children and among children, and offered rich and varied academic support, recreation, arts opportunities, and other enrichment activities.

At the end of the two-year period of the study, researchers concluded that “regular participation in high-quality afterschool programs is linked to significant gains in standardized test scores and work habits as well as reductions in behavior problems
among disadvantaged students.” In short, high-quality afterschool programs produce results.

Text courtesy of the Afterschool Alliance.