Behavior Supports in OST

Effective group management skills, especially those related to behavior, are consistently seen as critical in promoting regular participation, engagement and learning in out-of-school time activities. Unfortunately, most programs do not have integrated behavior management systems in place, and even when they do, these systems are often ineffective. This is due to a variety of challenges programs face every day: high staff turnover rates and insufficient training; children who are both physically and emotionally tired after their school day; and constantly changing conditions, including the number and mix of kids or limitations of space. OST workers need proper training and referral information to work with families when a child needs to be assessed for mental health supports. Developing staff competencies in addressing these problems has a lasting effect on children and has real benefits on the quality and sustainability of out-of-school time providers. Moreover, research-based models for inclusion and promoting positive behavior have a community value that must be recognized by policymakers and funders who decide on whether or not to invest in afterschool programs.

There is a very real social cost when afterschool programs struggle with behavior management. Often, youth are expelled, voluntarily withdrawn or referred to another program if available. In our experience, many programs view behavior management as intervention for youth who are “at-risk” rather than a program-wide approach. “Get tough” strategies, including punishment, exclusion and containment, are ineffective and reduce the ability of a child to benefit from positive social interaction with staff and other children. These outcomes are not only destructive they are unnecessary. Research suggests that children and youth, including those who need mental health services, will show measurable improvement in areas of behavioral adjustment when they are in supportive environments that promote positive social behavior.

Looking forward, it is clear that there are very real challenges. We need strong policies that support consistent funding to provide opportunities for staff development in behavioral training, more appropriate staff-to-child ratios and better systems for addressing children’s mental health issues. Sustained technical assistance is critical to foster long-term benefits for all children in out-of-school time programs. We need to support efforts to define and nurture a statewide professional workforce development system that identifies core competencies every youth worker needs to succeed and establishes well-defined pathways for career advancement. We need to continue to promote accreditation as a viable and sustainable path for organizations seeking to enhance the quality of their programs. Developing strong networks enables individual programs to leverage resources through collective power. We need to create capacity within the field to promote mentoring and support structures between programs so that the knowledge being generated in the field is shared. When we truly utilize the power of our community and networks to address these common issues, we will be better able to create lasting change.

Lastly, we need to think of all out-of-school time quality initiatives as an integrated system of program and staff development. We cannot separate a program’s ability to engage families from its skill in including children with disabilities, its use of space, or its efforts to promote positive behavior. All of these competencies are linked to broader systemic issues that need to be continually reinforced so that quality programming can be sustained for all children.

Federal Stimulus Bill Brings Opportunities and Questions

After a contentious few weeks on capital hill, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 on February 17, 2009. The legislation provides for a combination of stimulus spending and tax cuts totaling $789 billion (according to some estimates, approximately 40% of the total is tax cuts). Speaking to reporters the day after the bill was signed, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick noted that the state will receive somewhere between $6 and $9 billion in federal money. Patrick also noted that the state has limited flexibility in how these funds are used because under the provisions of the bill funds will go to “specific programs with specific purposes.”

A variety of provisions in the bill will have either a direct or indirect impact on funding for afterschool and out-of-school time services for families in Massachusetts. While the details are still unclear, the key provisions for our field include:

1. $2 Billion for Child Care and Development Block Grants (CCDBG)—The CCDBG is one of the largest funding streams for childcare subsidies, such as vouchers. According to the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership, MA will receive approximately $24 million in these funds. This represents a 23% increase in the FY2009 allocation, to be used within the next 2-3 years:
· Over $20 million in non-targeted CCDBG funds
· Nearly $2 million in non-targeted quality improvement funds
· Over $1 million in targeted quality improvement funds for infants and toddlers
2. $2.1 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start. The Department of Early Education and Care anticipate an additional $10.1 million for Massachusetts.
3. $13 Billion for Title 1 Funds—These funds are used to support programs that improve the academic opportunities for disadvantaged and underrepresented students, including both in-school and out-of-school programs.
· MA will likely receive over $208 million for Title 1 funding
4. The Workforce Investment Act grants that support job training services will receive $1.2 billion for youth job training programs and summer employment opportunities for youth. The WIA also includes $50 million for the YouthBuild program providing at-risk youth educational and occupational experience and credentials while building affordable housing.
· MA set to receive approximately $25 million for youth job services and summer job opportunities.
5. The AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps VISTA program will receive $160 million through the stimulus bill to support existing state and national grantees and to support AmeriCorps Volunteers, many of who provide staffing for afterschool programs.
6. $53.6 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Funds—Included in these funds are $5 billion to be coordinated by the Department of Education through state grants and a $650 innovation fund. States will also receive approximately $40 billion in Education Blog Grants.
· MA will receive approximately $813 million for education spending. This funding is targeted to make up for cuts in k-12 funding since FY2008; to fund increases in education spending based on state funding formulas; and, to make up for funding cuts to higher education since FY2008.

We will continue to keep you updated as more details become clear about how these funds will be specifically allocated. It is crucial that we remain vocal and reach out to our state leaders to ensure that funding decisions provide the most critical supports for the children and youth of Massachusetts. For more information on the state's use of ARRA funds, visit www.mass.gov/recovery

Outcomes and Assessment?

In developing a presentation on out-of-school outcomes and assessment, I was amazed at the number of tools out there to measure program quality or lead to other management outcomes. These tools are too numerous to get into an in-depth discussion here, but the larger issue raised is a good one: If we are measuring, who has the authority to determine what is measured? Another follow up question may be, is that authority final, or subject to change in two, three, four years and every two or more years after?

Damned Lies and Statistics by Joel Best is a well-known work poking a few holes in our use of numbers in shaping social programs or solving societal issues. The first case tackled in the book is that of a statistic used in 1994 that claimed that every year the number of "American children who have been gunned down has doubled." Taking aside that "children" by 1994 had expanded to include 21 years old (today "youth violence" seems to include 27 years old) the number of children "gunned down" would have by that year been 35 trillion since the source of that "fact" was from 1950 and even if one child had been gunned down, that number would have grown exponentially.

So, in our popular media we cannot trust 90% of the statistics %100 of the time and for many of us, this is not a new part of life. What is related, however, to our work and the use of numbers, is how were the numbers gathered in the first place and what tools shaped which outcomes or "facts" are elevated? These assessments and the outcomes they highlight are not just exercises, they are increasingly seen as a way to merit (read fund) a program. Take for example the 21st Century Learning Center process. Programs rushed to the initial funding, altered how they structured their programs and even how they interacted with children, and then when the reapplication process came due, how many met the criteria of "exemplary"? Fewer than the initial cohort of sites, and of those achieving "exemplary" status, it is no secret that funding ends in 2010 and that this program is perhaps a ghost of the past administration.

And, these 21st Century Learning Centers were but one example of a move for increased "outcomes" and more "standards" that applied across communities and programmatic forms. Who created those assessments, and what do they hold up as examples of a quality program. It appears that in this current "free market" of ideas, we still have competing interests and attitudes vying for the Nihil Obstat of funders, the Out-of-School field, and the formal educational community that impacts and shapes an increasing amount of childrens' time.

In researching the topic of outcomes and assessment in Out-of-School Time for a future BOSTnet Roundtable, there are many questions that are being raised. Do these current tools lead to quality? What are we measuring as "quality" and does this need to reflect individual programmatic goals or are there indeed larger "systems" in place?

We will see and in the mean time, caveat emptor.

Fragmentation: Is Youth Development a Field?

Working in the field of Youth Development the strongest characteristic of the profession is fragmentation.

Organizations and individual researchers write about the unique aspects of Youth Development and then create programs that continue NCLB-style academic formats or "follow the money" to further marry Youth Development to traditional models of school.

Various voices compete to create systems of credentialing, licensing, or "systematize" the work and expecting the field to "professionalize" according to collegiate models or other professions where compensation and the type of service differ greatly (a lawyer and a youth worker may both work hard, but they don't work the same).

Consultants, trainers, and certificate programs compete and sprout up and use models and frameworks that are often presented prematurely in the rush to take small pilots "to scale" and untested ideas "national."

Funders support work inconsistently and do not make long-term investments so that many Youth Development programs have to re-cast themselves every year or jump from one pilot to another never getting past the start-up stage.

Programs do not see themselves in the same work. Program providers don't identify with each other or collaborate for funding, focus, or message. The "field" of the youth worker has more vulnerabilities than it has assets.

This does not mean that the type of work need be unified into one system. What it may require, however, is for more youth workers to look beyond their population's needs, the mission of their organization, or agenda, and see that the work of Youth Development covers diverse programs, people, and approaches from inner city child care to suburban arts enrichment and outdoor exploration. It is an umbrella that should gather together various good quality people who work with youth to develop their social and emotional well being rather than it is today - fragmented and under threat as each individual organization and program vies with the next for scarce resources. We cannot blame the policy makers for crashing around from school to after-school, from private to public monies, they cannot know the work we do if we do not articulate it well.

New Directions in Youth Policy

At the invitation of PPV, BOSTnet was able to attend the New Directions in Youth Policy event October 7th, 2008 in New York City. Held at the Ford Foundation (supporter of PPV), a large building reminiscent of the now-distant era of Cold War philanthropy, the agenda was dominated by the discussion of the economy. Not as you would expect the economy at hand - the financial meltdown that is occurring now and which may last for years - but the economy of youth as workers. This loss in employed youth is not a new trend, the result of video games and youtube, but a hollowing out of our economy over the past thirty years. It was proposed that young people who work at 17 are more likely to work at 18 and so on. They develop habits of mind as well as need to work in situations that get them in contact with people different from themselves - and the back room of McDonald's does not offer that socio-economic as well as skill set diversity.

Andrew Sum, Director of the Center for Labor Studies at Northeastern University and a professor at the same institution painted a bleak picture of the landscape of young people in this country. According to the data on youth, young people are struggling to achieve economic and social stability. They are failing to sustain long-term personal relationships beneficial to the economic well being of children. They are failing to learn common job skills. Life expectancy and fertility are increasingly correlated to income level in ways that haven't been since in this country.

Andrew Sum proposed that this was the result of several administrations not taking youth employment seriously and allowing the industrial economy to be replaced with, what Wilbur Toss, an older businessman interviewed on NPR's Marketplace recently said out service economy was a sham. That we cannot build the sort of level of prosperity we are accustomed to by "flipping burgers, selling scraps of papers, or suing each other." This loss of employment with low barriers to entry (not requiring degrees and certifications) that connected young people to a world of work was not the inevitability of "globalization" but a lack of policies that protected our workforce and nurtured our native economy.

This was also not an issue with recessions apparently, since the only time where the numbers of employed youth increased was for a few years during the late 1990s. Youth in the labor market have been facing trouble whether the economy is robust or recession and the past eight years have been dismal. One issue is a loss of job usually held by young people to undocumented workers. Another issue is that adult workers are increasingly needing to fill jobs once held by teens. (Not spoken about but of note is the expansion of elderly in the workforce - such as at Walmarts and the like). For teens and young adults who still want to work, few of these jobs expose young workers to skilled people, train them in marketable skills, or pay them a wage they can live on. This, Andrew Sum argues, has led to an across the board decline in living standard that is not left behind when this generation grows up but leads to a lifetime of underemployment of unemployment. Sum noted a rise in unstable single parent homes, increasing numbers of children born to proportional to the lack of income, and lower life expectancies - especially for native-born minorities.

The presentation was compelling, as it was dismal news, especially to a room of people who had worked in philanthropy for thirty years or more. However, within this great problem there is great opportunity for Out-of-School programs. More than reaching out to teach more children in need and to compensate for the shortcomings of young parents unable to provide for their off spring, Out-of-School programs can serve as a place of meaningful employment for young people and job creation so that these young workers can learn meaningful skills as they provide needed labor to programs that cannot afford to pay high wages and yet need qualified and quality people.

What are the costs of Out-of-School programs? What are some ways to maximize their benefit to communities, especially low income communities? There is usually a coordinator/director and then "direct-service" or line staff. Those Direct Service staff are paid perhaps $8.25 - $11 per hour and in some areas or programs as much as $20 per hour. The major and constant issue with staffing is employee turn over and (at least prior to the melt down) many programs have constant trouble attracting staff at all. Staff come in, work a few months and leave. In New York State these after-school employees were considered "migrant workers" the same as farm help. Very telling. This is a labor issue, and an issue of compensation but also an issue of who is the appropriate workforce. If compensation is raised too much, it may put the programs out of business since overhead will outstrip resources. If a constant drum beat is on professionalization with its certificates, degrees, and career ladders, will that actually prevent the creation of a viable workforce? Young people need meaningful employment. Out-of-School programs need low-cost quality staff for direct service. Looking at a particular segment of the population as these workers would allow for more refined approach to training and development.

Out-of-School programs, if intentionally done, can learn to market to that workforce outreach, training and technical assistance, and provide dual services - one to children and youth development, the other to economic development of communities and the youth who need to learn how to work as they learn how to do that work. (The US military looks towards a particular age group and skill level, why not OST?). Youth learn marketable skills working at an out-of-school program they may not folding shirts or waiting for the buzzer of the fry-o-later to sound. They learn critical thinking skills, problem solving, and perhaps project management if their program has a project-based learning focus. Many young people may themselves want to go into youth work as a career. Many will see adults with skills they can learn from. Trainings are no longer cattle calls trying to reach out to diverse skills and competencies (how many OST trainings include teachers of 10 years and 16 year old high school students?) but can focus on a certain level and develop and refine a language to speak to that level. Staff turn over need not be seen as a bad thing, if the staff last for the academic year. In this way, the turn over is build into the system rather than fought against. A battle that cannot be won by increasing moral, raising a low wage a few cents, printed certificates, or top heavy college degree programs.

Perhaps after-school and OST programs can serve as that job that made a difference as the programs are to make a difference to children. We need to use this crises in youth employment and see the opportunities OST can provide. Perhaps rather than another set of competencies we need come up with who we see actually doing this work now, and in the years to come.