After-School Push Poses Complex Challenge
Education Week
Linda Jacobson
August 29, 2007
California’s Proposition 49 has extended thousands of new after-school programs for at-risk children to communities in need. Along with these programs comes the burden of hiring adequate staff to run them, which is difficult as hiring standards are based on ambiguous laws. Governor Schwarzenegger hopes to make these programs available to all needy families, but recently experts in the field have pointed out that the quality of the program is also an important consideration. Georgia Hall, a research scientist with the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at the Wellesley Centers for Women, echoed this concern. While acknowledging that Proposition 49 is leading the way in after-school program expansion, she also stated, “We can’t just start opening up more and more programs without being conscious of quality.” As after-school programs expand, these challenges persist, and a separate debate continues over whether to evaluate the programs based on academic improvement or social-emotional development.
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