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ATLANTA — When NAA President and CEO Gina Warner stepped to the podium at lunchtime Tuesday at the National Afterschool Association Convention, she had bad news.
A school shooting had just happened in Maryland and news media were reporting another package containing explosives in Austin, Texas.
To the assembled group, the message was clear: Their work is needed.
Earlier that day, NAA board chairwoman Tracey Lay had told the group as much. What you’re doing “is so important and it matters,” she said.
“We were doing social and emotional learning before anyone knew what SEL stood for,” said Lay, who is also director of school age programs and development services at EdAdvance, a Connecticut state agency supporting school districts and communities.
After-school programs were helping young people succeed in school and life before any research told us we should, she said.
For many, social and emotional learning programs hold a key to helping youth understand and manage their emotions, empathize with others, develop good relationship skills and make wise choices.
The implication is that they will help set youth on the right track and reduce antisocial outcomes.
As schools have focused on standardized testing and as the wealth gap widens, after-school leaders see their programs as filling the gap — especially for marginalized young people who may be living in poverty.
But assisting young people “is a significant challenge,” said Byron Garrett, a keynote speaker at the convention who chairs the National Family Engagement Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming education through family engagement.
“Young people deal with different issues than we’ve seen,” he said. “Our young people are bombarded with diverse types of multimedia messages. Our role is to help them make sense of them.”
And many young people face issues that are not necessarily visible to adults in after-school programs.
“We don’t know what our students deal with until we go home with them,” Garrett said. Parents may be unavailable because of substance abuse, mental health issues or a myriad of reasons.
“I know too many families who fall through the cracks,” he said. They count on our program to bridge the gap, he said.
To reach and support these young people, after-school programs “need to be real and relevant,” Garrett cautioned.
Another concern at the convention was that the message of after-school’s impact is not getting out.
Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant urged NAA members to use social media and other means to reach legislators. The alliance is a nonprofit after-school advocacy group. The White House has proposed cutting all federal funding for after-school — money that provides programming to nearly 1.7 million mostly low-income children.
Workshops at the NAA convention explored staff practices that promote social and emotional development in kids, ways to measure a program’s impact and how to incorporate what is learned through research. Other workshops taught how to create effective environments, how to create youth-driven programs and how to best engage youth. Others addressed equity and inclusion. The convention also focused on effective STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs. One workshop focused on how to support grieving youth.
