Today, students' academic achievement is slowly seeing a return to pre-pandemic trends. Researchers do not estimate a full recovery in the near future, and studies show students continue to struggle with feelings of stress, isolation, anxiety, and depression. As the nation seeks solutions to help young people amidst these struggles, voters and…

Background: Staff play a critical role in promoting positive youth development in out-of-school-time programs, yet little is known about best-practices for preparing staff to work with youth and meet their needs. The present study seeks to understand the impact of a basic psychological needs training on the staff's ability to deliver…

It is the position of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) that all students, including those with disabilities or special healthcare needs, must have equal opportunity to safely take part in school-sponsored before, after, and extended school year programs and activities, also known as Out of School Time (OST). The registered…

This mixed methods study examines the creativity of Black girls as they learned to code virtual environments in an afterschool program. The afterschool program, West Philly Tech Camp/Black Girls in Computing was a nine-week program in which students learned to code a virtual chatbot using Python. The program's design was guided by culturally…

Written expression is a complex and critical skill that many students in the U.S. struggle to master (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). Meanwhile, the COVID pandemic has expedited the need to find feasible interventions that support students writing in a virtual landscape (The National Association of School Psychologists, 2020).…

Digital learning resources are commonly employed to support learning in out-of-class contexts, either as a complement to the learning in formal classrooms or as an alternative that can be used by learners to pursue personal learning goals. This study identified a significant gap in the literature concerning children's use of digital technology to…

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has administered the federally-funded Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Center (21st CCLC) grant program, also known as Title IV, Part B, of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) since 2002. The purpose of the program is to create community learning centers that provide students with…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl's embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant…

Michelle (Micki) Seligson has been nationally recognized as a leader in afterschool and in childcare policy and practice. In 1978, she founded the School-Age Childcare Project, which became the National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST) at Wellesley College. To commemorate NIOST's 40th anniversary, she sat down with Georgia Hall, director…

All students deserve access to a high-quality education and the resources they need to thrive. However, in Michigan this has not been the reality for far too long, particularly for students who are the most underserved. Longstanding inequities have persisted and worsened since the beginning of the pandemic, and Michigan has fallen further and…

Out-of-school time (OST) programs serving predominantly racialized minority communities can help reduce racial disparities in STEM as they provide a culturally affirming learning environment that includes supportive staff of similar ethnic identities as the youth. However, staff at OST programs located in underserved communities that serve…

Background or Context: Middle-school Girls of Color experience complex systems of relationships, structures, and situations in and out of school spaces. Their experiences, however, are often at the margins or excluded from middle school curricula and after-school programming. In this article, we focus on how young women engage with chisme to…

Afterschool and summer programs offer a multitude of benefits for students and families across the nation, from providing tangible resources like wraparound services to connecting students with supportive adults and peers. These programs not only deliver immediate benefits, but research also shows they bear long-term positive effects on students'…

This study sought to understand the influence of participation in a physical activity-based, social and emotional learning-focused after-school. Undergraduate students (N = 25) from a variety of ethnic backgrounds participated in semi-structured interviews and regular journaling. Data were analyzed inductively and deductively through the lens of…

With the rise of COVID-19 and growing awareness of racial injustice, the last few years have been exceptionally tumultuous for our systems of education and their stakeholders. But scholars critical of traditional paradigms of schooling and accountability have argued that these crises kindle opportunities for profound change. Gloria…