The Y4Y Insider - February 2022 |
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See You at Beyond School Hours! |
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Attending Foundations’ Beyond School Hours conference? Join You for Youth (Y4Y) at the following sessions. See the conference website for more information.
Career Pathways for Students: Launching Youth Into the Future
Explore the career pathways approach for connecting academic skills with diverse career opportunities for today’s youth.
Thursday, Feb. 24, 9:30-10:45 a.m. ET
Human Resources With Y4Y
Practice a scenario-based interviewing approach, learn about effective on-the-job communication, and consider ways to embed positivity and encourage intrinsic motivation in all program participants.
Thursday, Feb. 24, 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. ET
Y4Y Listening Session
Join Y4Y to brainstorm ways to support universal access to health and wellness and shape the future of 21st CCLC whole child wellness with your passionate out-of-school time community.
Friday, Feb. 25, 11 a.m.–12:15 p.m. ET
And join Y4Y in the exhibit hall to learn more about our free professional development resources, available to all out-of-school time professionals, not just 21st Century Community Learning Centers.
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So many lessons have come out of the pandemic. Like young people of the past who’ve lived through natural disasters and wartime, today’s children will carry some lifelong scars. But scars are reminders that the body has healed itself. This generation’s brilliance will be in their resilience. In this issue:
A great place to start building student resilience is ensuring your program takes a whole child approach. Check out this month’s Voices From the Field podcast. Our guest, Brittany Miracle, addresses Ohio’s adoption of a statewide Whole Child Framework.
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Y4Y Needs You!
Help the Y4Y Team: Social Entrepreneurship and Service Learning
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These topics will be addressed in a new Y4Y course. Can you help the Y4Y team connect these topics with real experiences in 21st CCLC programs? We love to include your ideas, tips, and solutions in Y4Y courses, so your practice contributes to improving out-of-school time programs for all students.
If you’ve used entrepreneurship or service-learning activities, please tell us your stories. Descriptions of the following will be especially useful:
- Successes with engaging students in meaningful ways, linking the activities to academic needs, making real-world and sustained connections with community needs and organizations
- Challenges and solutions to keeping activities on track
- Strategies for engaging with new community partners and organizations
- Value added as indicated by student, family, and staff responses to the activities
- Outcomes that demonstrate impact on the community.
Please email your ideas to Y4Y. If you’re willing, include your contact information. We won’t share that or use your name, though we may follow up with you after reading your story.
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Special Opportunity
Call for Presenters
The U.S. Department of Education is pleased to invite you to the Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) 2022 Summer Symposium. Please save the date for this event, which will be held virtually this year on July 19-21, 2022.
The Summer Symposium will feature successful strategies that state education agencies (SEAs), and their grantees can use to implement and manage all components of a 21st CCLC program. Attendees will hear from nationally recognized speakers during plenary sessions and work closely with education experts and peers during interactive workshops. SEAs, staff and grantees will gain valuable perspectives on afterschool issues and receive important updates about the 21st CCLC program.
This year’s theme is Strong You, Strong Me, Strong Community. Ideas for integrating virtual elements are woven throughout each of the Symposium strands. Read more and apply to present today.
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Webinars
LIVE With Y4Y
Knowledge Is Power: Leveraging Data to Improve Program Quality
Thursday, March 10, 1-2:30 p.m. ET
Accessing and making sense of data can be a challenge for new and veteran program directors alike. The U.S. Department of Education's You for Youth (Y4Y) Technical Assistance Team is here to help. In this session of LIVE With Y4Y, our team, with the help of a few special guests, provides an overview of the types of data your 21st CCLC program should collect, discusses strategies for communicating about data, offers tips for managing and maintaining your data, and describes how to use data for program improvement.
Do you have questions about Y4Y webinar registration, sign-in, participation, or certificates? Send your queries to this email address for the quickest response: Y4YWebinars@seiservices.com. |
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Gathering STEAM
Powering Your STEM/STEAM Initiatives
New Children’s Storybook From NASA
Celebrate Computer Science With the IF/THEN Collection
Careers That Use Design Thinking
This two-part webinar series from Jobs for the Future (JFF) acquaints directors and facilitators with inclusive and equitable design process activities for middle and high school students. See Part I and Part II on demand.
eePro
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Family Resources
Family engagement is a legislated component of 21st CCLC programs. Y4Y wants to help you build your library of national resources to better serve your families. Did you know the federal government can aid families with tax preparation free of charge? Share the IRS Free Tax Return Preparation for Qualifying Taxpayers page with families today!
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Tech Tip
Did you know Y4Y produces a monthly podcast? Hear from experts on topics ranging from forest kindergarten to “undoing right-answer thinking” and many topics in between for ideas on making your 21st CCLC program even better. Hit Play while you walk the dog or cook dinner, and Y4Y’s many Voices From the Field will keep you company.
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State Coordinators Corner
Post of the Month
Are you looking for an easy way to tell grantees in your state about new Y4Y content? Feel free to share the below Post of the Month on your social media accounts:
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Statewide Whole Child Initiatives
The state of Ohio is implementing a Whole Child Framework statewide after years of research and development. Podcast guest Brittany Miracle, Assistant Director of Health, Attendance and Family and Community Engagement Supports with the Ohio Department of Education, gave Y4Y a broad overview of their efforts.
Y4Y: We know that you collaborated with Ohio’s 21st CCLC state coordinator to be sure that the grant request for proposal document, or RFP, aligned with and perhaps even gave preference to applicants with commitment to Ohio’s Whole Child Framework. Can you tell us a little about that process and who you might suggest state coordinators collaborate with in their own states to stay on the cutting edge of this work, especially as new RFPs are in development as we speak?
BM: Yes, that’s a great example of alignment within a state agency. We worked with our 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant administrators to embed whole child language and priorities into their most recent request for grant proposals, or RFP. We had team members on the writing team who had a specific eye on school safety, anti-harassment, intimidation and bullying, family engagement, and positive behavioral interventions and supports. As I mentioned previously, it can be really powerful when expectations, language, and culture are consistent from before school (like a bus ride and breakfast in the cafeteria) throughout the day, to afterschool activities. We also recommend having a 21st Century Community Learning Centers representative sit on the leadership or PBIS [Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports] team in the school they are serving. This helps to align priorities and keep everybody moving in the same direction. It could be a monthly literacy goal where all third-graders are reading the same book. The afterschool program could use the same questions teachers are using in the classroom to reinforce the lesson. It could also be using common language when talking to parents about the importance of regular student attendance.
Part of Ohio’s framework is having districts align their programs and resources — we’re committed to doing the same thing at the state level. We can’t have local alignment if we’re still working in silos at the state level. Ohio has also worked with our McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Program, our Office of School Improvement, and Office of Federal Programs, and those conversations have resulted in deep connections for implementation.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
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Voices From the Field
Y4Y recently enjoyed a conversation with the Ohio Department of Education’s Brittany Miracle, who is the assistant director of health, attendance, and family and community engagement supports within their Office of Whole Child Supports. We asked Ms. Miracle to shed some light on how her state came to adopt its Whole Child Framework, and the lessons out-of-school programs can learn from it.
Y4Y: Ms. Miracle, please share with our listeners a little about how Ohio developed its Whole Child Framework.
BM: All of Ohio’s whole child work began with Ohio’s strategic plan for education: Each Child, Our Future. During stakeholder outreach to develop the strategic plan, the Department heard that nonacademic needs must be prioritized as much as academics. Each Child, Our Future provides a common vision for our children — that they are challenged to discover and learn; prepared to pursue a fulfilling post-high school path; and empowered to become resilient, lifelong learners who contribute to society. Among the strategies in Each Child, Our Future is a strategy to meet the needs of the whole child, which reads, “Work together with parents, caregivers, and community partners to help schools meet the needs of the whole child.” This strategy emerged from a deep recognition that “unless the whole child is considered and supported, the conditions for learning are less than optimal.” This strategy called upon the Ohio Department of Education to develop, in partnership with stakeholders, a whole child framework.
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Brittany Miracle is a social worker and policy wonk who’s passionate about making education accessible and equitable for all students. When she’s not talking about Ohio’s Whole Child Framework, Brittany is an avid reader, a toddler commander, and a budding baker. |
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An important part of social and emotional learning is reflecting on the things in our lives that are really small annoyances that we need to just “get over.” Have students write down their troubles on a scrap of paper then tear them up to symbolize their power over them.
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March 14 is National Learn About Butterflies Day. STEM activities in biology, light, flight, and more can be centered on these beautiful bugs.
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March 22 marks 50 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress. Read about how this amendment to the U.S. constitution has never been ratified by states and what that means.
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“Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it, and this is called in the one instance: hope.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
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Topical Tool Kit
This curated tool kit will help your 21st CCLC recruit and retain staff in an environment of staffing crisis. Also check out the full Y4Y course on Human Resources.
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Additional Y4Y resources include links to Career Development Resources to demonstrate your program is a growth opportunity to your current and prospective employees, as well as the below webinars:
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Disclaimer: This newsletter may contain links to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links and pointers are provided for the user’s convenience. The U.S. Department of Education does not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness or completeness of this outside information. Further, the inclusion of links or pointers to particular items is not intended to reflect their importance, nor is it intended to endorse any views expressed, donation solicitations or products or services offered, on these outside sites, nor any organizations sponsoring the sites, whether financially or by website hosting.
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