It's About Time...

November 7, 2005

By C. Warren Moses, CEO, The Children’s Aid Society
and Philip Coltoff, former CEO, The Children’s Aid Society

…. Our children’s time; specifically, the time they spend outside of school. There is a formal recognition, finally, of the value of the after-school hours, now better known as out-of-school-time, or OST.

Traditionally a loose patchwork of programs offered by a plethora of agencies, often on shoestring budgets, after-school programming has been an area of tremendous unmet need both in terms of children served and services offered, as well as an area of tremendous potential. Though many providers have long moved beyond thinking of after-school programs as custodial, “simply a safe place for the children of working families to stay until someone could pick them up,” as DYCD describes an attitude of the past, many providers have been at a loss as to how to structure out-of-school time to provide additional learning opportunities, enrichment, new experiences and frankly, programming that children and teen youth would want to attend. Limited resources led to some existing programs that are not well designed or organized or as well overseen as they might have been or as is required, to produce the quality programming our children deserve.

The good news is that New York City has made a tremendous effort to organize and improve after-school programming in its new OST initiative. This initiative, unveiled at the end of last year, will go a long way to meet the needs of children and youth throughout New York City. It will serve 65,000 in its first year, through combined funding from ACD and DYCD, and will foster “safe and developmentally appropriate environments for children and youth when they are not in school,” through a “comprehensive, coordinated system,” according to the OST RFP. The initiative intends to particularly serve those in disadvantaged communities.

We feel that with a variety of settings for programs (i.e., both public schools and community centers), OST promises to combine the best practices of many agencies that previously operated independently in New York City, but bolstered by standards, accountability, measurable outcomes, enhanced resources and improvement in the delivery and quality of services.

Children and youth in underserved communities, and their families, would be even better served with the provision of additional services, beyond educational and recreational, at the OST sites. These additional services should include on-site or site-linked mental health, medical and dental services, where needed, if we are to truly serve the whole child and his/her most pressing needs. The variety of settings permitted in the OST initiative should help make accessibility of these services a reality for many of the children and youth served.

We believe that one of the major outgrowths of the RFP process was the realization of the real cost of providing high quality, effective out-of-school time services, with top quality, trained staff. Currently the OST initiative provides about $2,000 per elementary level child per school year for school settings, but existing providers know that the true cost is often considerably higher. Current funding in the initiative – expecting growth in numbers – is simply not sufficient in the long run.

Looking at what we are providing children during these hours, the OST initiative gives agencies a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink not just what happens during the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 pm daily, but to rethink the entire school day. The OST initiative is, in fact, a programmatic challenge for everyone concerned with children’s learning. Here is our chance to create programs that truly engage children. Here is our opportunity to engage them in their communities, in service learning, in civics and to turn out responsible citizens. Since different children learn differently, and Perse experiences help more children learn better, if the day is longer and the staff is well trained, the opportunities are endless.

Overall, we are happy with the huge step forward signified by the OST initiative. New York City’s educators and CBOs have an historic opportunity to consider the needs of children and families that can be met through this initiative. We can merge our ideas, philosophies and resources. We do have concerns, however. Despite the size of this initiative, reportedly the largest of its size in the nation, with its goal of serving 65,000 children, it will meet just over half the need for out-of-school time programming in New York City.

We’re concerned, too, about the total allocation of funds that will help grow this program. We’re grateful for the additional $15 million this year added by the mayor to the original ACD/DYCD contribution of $46 million, but we have no assurance that those extra funds will be provided annually. In this regard, we are very pleased that the city’s brief to the court-appointed panel on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s (CFE) lawsuit designated $250 million to be spent on preschool as well as after-school services. We expect city government to hold to that commitment once the CFE issue is resolved.

All in all, the OST initiative opens a world of opportunity for children and their families to receive vital educational and additional services. It’s up to us providers to consider how we will serve children in a thoughtful, multidimensional fashion, and, how we will pay for it.