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Afterschool Programs
Why Municipal Leaders Make Afterschool a City Priority
Eight million children between ages five to 14 go home to an empty house on a regular basis. For communities across America, these unsupervised hours after school mean heightened risks and missed opportunities:
- Most juvenile crime is committed between 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., with the crime rate tripling in the first hour after school is out.
- The afterschool hours are also prime times for teenage sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, and automobile accidents.
- Afterschool programs provide a safe environment where youth can engage in fun and constructive activities, while also contributing to worker productivity by reassuring parents that their children are in a supervised setting with caring adults.
- Afterschool hours provide an ideal time to reinforce children's learning gains and supplement the academic curriculum offered at school.
What Municipal Leaders Can Do to Expand Afterschool Opportunities
Many cities have created afterschool programs to promote learning, keep children out of trouble, and meet the needs of working parents. Municipal leaders can strengthen afterschool programs by:
- Promoting partnerships that make it possible to forge a shared vision of afterschool challenges and opportunities;
- Building public will to sustain a strong municipal role in the development of a local afterschool system over time;
- Assessing local resources and needs through surveys and data analyses;
- Improving quality so that programs effectively deliver on the promises of safety, academic achievement, and cultural enrichment;
- Broadening access to ensure that all children, including those from low-income families and neighborhoods and diverse cultural backgrounds, have opportunities to participate; and
- Financing a citywide system for afterschool opportunities that supports stability and long-term growth.
In each of these areas, municipal officials can play leadership roles by focusing public attention on key issues, convening major stakeholders, and setting an agenda for citywide progress.
Goals of the YEF Institute's Afterschool Initiatives
The goal of the YEF Institute's afterschool initiatives is to:
- Promote the spread of useful, reliable knowledge, information, and tools that will enable city leaders to build effective systems that support high-quality out-of-school time programs;
- Help city leaders share strategies, ideas, challenges, and solutions to strengthening local afterschool systems by creating opportunities for cross-city peer exchange; and
- Provide technical assistance and practical advice to cities through site visits, cross-site meetings, phone and e-mail consultation, and access to other national experts.
Afterschool Staff Contacts
Audrey Hutchinson, Program Director: 202-626-3053 or hutchinson@nlc.org
Bela Shah, Senior Program Associate: 202-626-3057 or shah@nlc.org
Lane Russell, Research Associate: 202-626-3008 or russell@nlc.org
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