We know that many billions of dollars are spent towards children’s school-based academic education, in which typically, one adult engages at least 20 kids for at least 50 minutes, about 5 times per day, which with breaks and lunch amounts to about 7 hours per day. Now imagine that for about 1% of that budget, a team of staff, mostly part-time, engages about 70% of those kids for about 40% of that 7 hours, in academic support and social-emotional learning, but struggles to do it well because the budget is dramatically insufficient? That is afterschool, and if we are putting our money where our beliefs are, afterschool can only be expected to be warehousing children so their parents can work. Yet significant expectations are placed on afterschool programs. Staff place them on themselves, because they are dedicated to the idea that kids should have an afterschool program that actually helps them with what used to be called the soft skills the skills that not all kids learn at home before kindergarten, about concentrating, listening to directions, sharing, empathizing with others, being a good friend, acting on internalized beliefs of fairness, etc.

It used to be the case, in my city of Milwaukee, that a medium afterschool program would have about $200,000 as an annual budget, and could do pretty well with that. But this has now been reduced to as little as $50,000, but with more expectations piled on, and in an economy with much tighter unemployment, leading to an epidemic of chronic staff shortages. Which we know means the kids are getting shorted. Kids in poverty who need quality afterschool programs are experiencing chaos and low-quality programs that have been shown to be additional risk factors in kid’s lives, contributing to their developmental delays and trauma rather than being a protective factor.

Yet our programs forge on, trying against all odds to run a program that helps most children, on balance, and sometimes manages to succeed. But we know we need to be better. We know our afterschool programs should have the supports they need to be a consistent positive force in children’s lives. Afterschool programs are part of our national infrastructure in ways at least as important as our sewage pipes and bridges and electric grids, and should be appropriated the funds necessary to build the social-emotional skills that support not only academic success but the ability to be a civic contributor, neighbor and mentor that will be instrumental to the rebuilding of our country.