After-School Programs for All: A Solution Whose Time Has Come

By Lisa Kosan

At the age of 7, Daphne Mills wore a house key on a string around her neck and rode a city bus home after school with her 9-year-old brother. There, the youngsters played, watched a little Star Trek, had a snack and waited for their mother to get home from work.

More than 30 years later, Mills’ 9-year-old daughter asks when she’ll be old enough to fend for herself after school. “I tell her to ask me again when she’s 12,” Mills says.

But even then, Mills doubts that she and her husband will allow their daughter to stay home alone after school. “I was a latchkey kid,” says Mills, who works full time. “That’s not healthy. There’s not enough structure, not enough adult supervision.”

So Mills’ girls – ages 6, 7 and 9 – attend a YMCA-run after-school program at their school. They check in with after-school staff by 2:45 p.m., and until Mills gets there at 5:30 or so, they keep busy. They do homework, eat a snack, play Red Rover in the gym or dodgeball outside, do art projects and talk to their friends.

“They’re happy there,” Mills says. “They’re safe, and they know they’re safe.”

Society Has Changed, Schools Haven’t

The parents of 28 million school-age children work outside of the home, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, but their kids are released from school long before they can fetch them. Many of them, like the Mills girls, attend after-school programs. But that’s not the case for an estimated 7 million to 15 million school-age children. These youngsters spend the afternoons on the street, at a playground, home alone or in more perilous situations.

Kids spend 80 percent of their waking time out of school due to an educational schedule based on a farming economy: afternoons and summers off meant kids could help out with farm work. Today, most families don’t live on farms and most parents work increasingly long hours outside of the home. But school schedules, for the most part, haven’t changed.

The result is a great deal more idle, unsupervised time for kids. That time is not only not being used to enrich and improve kids’ education at a time when American children consistently test below their counterparts around the world, but it is also contributing to rising crime rates that stem from unstructured, unsupervised afternoons.