Eureka After-School Program

February 2002
Program Highlights

Contact information:
E-mail is preferred: beachy@humboldt1.com

Lois Beachy
Eureka City Schools
3200 Walford Avenue
Eureka, CA 95503

Phone: 707/441-2424
Fax: 707/476-1603

Catalyst: Strong interest from parents. In addition, school district administrators were concerned about lower enrollments because parents were pulling kids out of the district in order to go to schools with after-school care.

Number of schools: Five elementary, two middle, and one junior high/high alternative school.

Number of young people served: 500 to 600.

Hours: After school until 5 p.m.; day camps during Thanksgiving Week and President’s Week. One site provides a four- to six-week summer program.

Funding: Primary funding is a federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant of $722,000 a year for three years; significant additional staffing resources come from AmeriCorps and CalSOAP as well as state reimbursement for intervention classes.

Governance: School district. An advisory board made up of school site and community groups plays a small role. One site has a student advisory committee. Students and parents are surveyed for interests.

Program: Homework and tutoring help (usually first hour); intervention program for reading and math; enrichment and recreation activities.

Coordination with schools: On school sites. Intervention classes are taught by certificated teachers, often from the site. Some site coordinators have lunch with teachers, and most attend school staff meetings. At some sites, the teachers give homework instruction to coordinators.

Staff: Full- or part-time site coordinators with both managerial experience and experience in social work or working with youth. Much of the rest of the staffing is provided by CalSOAP, AmeriCorps, and the city’s recreation department.

Staff to student ratio: Approximately 1 to 10.

Major goal: Enrichment of children’s lives.

Evaluation: After the first year there was definite improvement across the board, especially for students in the intervention classes. (See discussion below.)

Program Highlights

Small town program has big-city problems and benefits
The Northern California town of Eureka has less than 25,000 residents but has not escaped big-city drug problems, says Lois Beachy, school/community resources coordinator for the Eureka City School District. And poverty is also an issue. In some Eureka schools, up to 95% of the children receive free- or reduced-price lunches, she says.

Although Eureka faces many big-city problems, it also has big-city advantages many rural areas do not share: a four-year and a community college, a strong artist community, and “hundreds and hundreds” of private nonprofits. Beachy is seeking funding from the state for an “artist-in-residence” program next year, part of her efforts toward program sustainability. Each school is staffed with a site coordinator and college students.

Quality site coordinators create strong programs
Beachy credits energized and creative site coordinators with making the program work. “They hustle,” she says. She looks for people with both social work backgrounds and managerial experience. “With 80 kids running around and all these adults, you’ve got to have somebody with the training wheels off. These coordinators are the principals after school.”

Beachy also wants the programs to “provide a meaningful, interesting, growth-producing experience for a child in a safe place. I want to see kids growing, excited. You have to watch the schools or they will kill kids with academics. If you throw another two hours on top of the regular school day, I’m not sure what you have achieved.”

Intervention classes work
Beachy uses an outside evaluator, who works as a sounding board as well as giving feedback. The evaluator holds focus group interviews and surveys parents, teachers, and kids.

After the first year of the program there was definite improvement across the board, especially for students in the intervention classes. “But sometimes it’s hard to get a sense of what’s going on because some kids may attend five sessions and other kids 25 sessions,” Beachy says.

Beachy and the evaluator will be looking at the effect of the program on grades, test scores, and data such as writing samples. A lack of computer programs to sift data means doing some of this work by hand.