High-quality afterschool and summer learning programs are effective ways to support children and teens and accelerate their academic growth. In fact, the American Rescue Plan prioritized a significant amount of funding for out-of-school time programs because of the evidence of their effectiveness. Over the past few years, state educational…

The Center for Research in Educational Policy (CREP) has partnered with the Virginia Department of Education since 2005 to evaluate the Commonwealth's 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. The 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) is a federal grant program established by Congress as Title X, Part 1, of the Elementary and…

Youth are natural scientists at birth, discovering and exploring their world and trying to make sense of it (Bers, 2008). A child's education is not limited to just the time they spend in the classroom. Children learn at home with their families, in public libraries, or through out-of-school-time (OST) experiences provided at community centers and…

This report shares stories from around the country about community and state leaders working to strengthen partnerships, practices, and policies--all to improve the odds for youth. Stories in this report include: (1) Using new data to spark public conversations about youth issues in Indianola, MS; (2) Leaders building a children and youth master…

The ACE Mentor Program provides early career exposure, mentoring, and scholarships to high school students in an attempt to encourage them to enter one of the three fields that make up the ACE acronym: (1) architecture; (2) construction; and (3) engineering. Founded in 1993 by longtime engineering consultant Charles Thornton, the program is…

During the 2010-2011 school year, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) piloted the After-School Global Language Opportunity Benefiting All Learners (GLOBAL) program for 12 weeks at eight different school sites. This school year the program expanded to 25 weeks and 11 sites. GLOBAL is an approach to learning that allows students to develop basic…

Both employer expectations and education standards, including the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards, are shifting the focus of learning from knowledge and discrete skills to the ability to think critically and creatively. This paper describes the process of translating an existing teacher-led STEM curriculum to fit…

This article describes a critical service-learning initiative in which college students of Spanish taught in an after-school Spanish class for young heritage language (HL) speakers at a local elementary school. We contextualize the program within broad curricular revisions made to the undergraduate Spanish program in recent years, explaining how…

In this essay, we explain the development, implementation, and preliminary findings of an innovative writing program that drew upon a peer collaborative model and a community literacy perspective. Developed as an after school program, this project represented a community-university partnership designed to provide an enjoyable forum for teaching…

The Afterschool Alliance and MetLife Foundation are proud to celebrate a fifth round of the MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Awards. For the past five years, we have collaborated to highlight the work of quality afterschool programs that support children, families and communities across the nation. This compendium is a compilation of four…

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities--improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This report covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. It details what mayors, program providers, system…

This article presents a New York city after-school program started by MOUSE (Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools and Education), a national nonprofit group that teaches students how to fix computers, and equips them with the communication and problem-solving skills to help them in the working world. The MOUSE program is part of a trend…

School districts are making after-school day-care programs available for disabled children by expanding existing programs for non-disabled students to include children with disabilities. Project SCOPE (Serving Children of Parents Employed) in Springfield Illinois and school-age child-care programs in Arlington and Fairfax County, Virginia, are…

To improve its school failure rate, a Virginia intermediate school instituted Project Achievement, a privately funded program helping at-risk students complete homework assignments. Structured into three one-hour sessions featuring tutoring, interdisciplinary study groups, and special activities, the project is immensely popular. During the summer…

In order to prepare outstanding teachers, it is essential to provide opportunities for teacher candidates to use the theory learned in the college classroom in a "real physical education class." It is difficult to accomplish this when the university has so many physical education teacher education (PETE) majors that they overwhelm a…