The Y4Y Insider - March 2022 |
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See You at the National AfterSchool Association Convention! |
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Attending the convention in Las Vegas? Join You for Youth (Y4Y) at the following sessions. See the conference website for more information.
Adopting Practices and Procedures for Including Students With Disabilities
From the language you use to the space you occupy, you can make your out-of-school time program a supportive environment for all students. In this session, you’ll gain concrete strategies and resources you can adopt immediately in your inclusive program.
Tuesday, March 22, 8 - 9 a.m., Milano 2, Promenade Level
Kick the Kickball Rut!
Strengthen youth health and wellness by expanding program offerings. Come create a Small Activities Grab Bag — a bag of 2- to 3-minute “filler” activities for when students need a change of pace. These activities don’t require prep time or materials. Be ready to wiggle and dance!
Wednesday, March 23, 11 - 11:30 a.m., Neopolitan 4, Promenade Level
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It’s that time of year! Programs are heading into the homestretch, and you are thinking about summer offerings. But don’t take your eyes off your greatest goals. What’s your prize this year? New Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) reporting? Setting attendance records? Culminating events? In this issue:
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Keep your eyes on the “people prize” with tips and tools from Y4Y on recruiting students and staff.
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Your prized data look a little different this year. Make sure your collection efforts are well planned and executed.
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Help students reap the rewards of research with Y4Y resources on digital literacy.
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When you plan ahead for culminating for closure, a strong event will leave staff, students, and families feeling positive about a challenging year.
And podcast guest Tiffany Grant offers advice on helping students feel prized when she discusses African American Language and the sense of belonging.
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Archived Webinars
LIVE With Y4Y
Please note: A certificate of participation is available only to those who participate in the live events. Certificates will not be issued to those who view the recordings.
The ability to leverage data is powerful: it can inform program design, affect your program’s relationship with the school day, and help you recruit key partners. But 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.
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Gathering STEAM
Powering Your STEM/STEAM Initiatives
Celebrate Women’s History Month With NASA
North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE)
As NASA’s premier X-ray telescope, Chandra gives us a powerful tool to investigate hot regions of the Universe, from black holes to exploding stars to colliding galaxies and more. Get a backstage pass to Chandra’s Operations Control Center, tour the Chandra spacecraft through virtual reality, and take a (virtual) quick trip to some exploding stars in our own galaxy. This virtual field trip is part of the Code.org CS Journeys.
Visit the registration page and choose a session to submit your group’s registration for one of four upcoming sessions.
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NASA STEM: Explore the Sun’s Energy and Sun Protection, March 28, 5-6 p.m. ET
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Explore Flight: NASA’s Four Forces, March 29, 5-6 p.m. ET
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Explore Humans in Space: Christa McAuliffe’s Lost Lessons in Space on Chromatography, March 29, 7-8 p.m. ET
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NASA STEM: Wind Energy Design Challenges, April 7, 5-6 p.m. ET
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Celebrate Earth Day With Activities and Story Telling, April 14, 5-6 p.m. ET
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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. Do you have program juniors who are beginning to explore their next step? Seniors who have that step in mind and are sorting out how to pay for it? Perhaps even parents looking to go back to school? The federal Pell Grant is education funding that’s needs based and doesn’t need to be repaid. Share the Department of Education Pell Grant Program page so families can learn more! Also, the Department’s Financial Aid Toolkit includes a college prep checklist for adult students.
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Tech Tip
Thinking about your summer professional development needs as you bring in new staff? Jump to the Coaching My Staff section of the updated Introduction to 21st CCLCs course, select Menu in the course window, scroll down, and select slide 1.6: “Create a Professional Learning Plan.” The course will guide you to Y4Y content most appropriate for your program needs.
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State Coordinators Corner
Share With the Class!
Y4Y wants to hear from you! In our May issue, we’d love to publish descriptions of new or different supports you’re offering to guide grantees through reporting on new GPRA indicators and measures. Please email our editor today!
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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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Outreach to Grantees
You want to foster open communication with your subgrantees, but reaching out more frequently may be perceived as monitoring “overreach” or even punitive. Florida’s Bureau Chief of the Bureau of Family and Community Outreach, Kimberly Scriven Berry, shared with Y4Y how actions taken during the pandemic improved those relationships.
Y4Y: Can you give us a snapshot of how your monitoring efforts shifted in March 2020?
KB: In March of 2020, we were all uncertain about how the pandemic would impact our 21st CCLC programs. Initially, we followed the directives given to our local school districts with the thought that we would be closed an additional week. As the weeks continued, we determined that the closure would be much longer. We continued to mirror the actions of our districts; however, afterschool and summer is quite different. We began receiving more and more requests to reopen. Noting that our programs operate in schools, community centers, churches, and other locations, we realized that we needed to allow flexibility in our response.
As centers started to reopen, we wanted to ensure that they were doing so safely and with the breadth of services that 21st CCLC should provide. Instead of the typical monitoring associated with 21st CCLC, we began to make preparations for guidance on restart. We asked subrecipients to choose between a traditional and an innovative approach. The traditional approach was operations as usual, and the innovative approach was a hybrid approach. The innovative approach allowed subgrantees to begin operating virtually and then have them give us a plan for transitioning from virtual to in person and back if they needed to transition based on their local scenarios. While it took time for us to work through the plans, this approach allowed the approach to be customized based on the variations of local contexts in a large state.
Y4Y: What changes did you see in the dynamics between your office and grantees that you attribute to that shift?
KB: Recognizing that no one had ever experienced a pandemic, we realized that we had to pivot in our approach to monitoring and compliance. We had to be flexible in our attendance requirements, targets, and threshold — and the hours of operation. Adjusting the expectations around attendance allowed our office to offer individualized technical assistance to our subrecipients. We had to reach out to our grantees and determine what challenges they were facing and how they were overcoming those challenges, and also to share best practices.
These changes actually precipitated our new technical assistance strategy that focuses on monthly calls by our Program Specialists to check in and offer support with programming, data collection and support, and other fiscal issues. Subgrantees have reported feeling more supported now that we are checking in with them more frequently. The more frequent check-ins allowed us to build relationships that support our practitioners in the field more regularly.
Y4Y: Pandemic aside, what would your advice be for other state administrators of 21st CCLC grants, based on what this experience taught you?
KB: I would advise other state coordinators to be OK in sitting in the discomfort of not knowing what to do. We all are in this together, so lean on your colleagues in the field, in your agency, and in other states. Go through the process of brainstorming, problem solving, failing, and beginning again. Breathe and take it one step at a time.
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Voices From the Field
African American Language and the Sense of Belonging
Mrs. Tiffany Grant is a business development manager with First Children’s Finance, an organization that provides financial and business development assistance to child care businesses serving low- and moderate-income families and helps them connect with public and private resources. Drawing on both personal and professional experience, Mrs. Grant offers trainings on how a better understanding of what linguists call African American Language can advance equity and inclusion. Y4Y was eager to learn from Mrs. Grant how out-of-school time professionals can honor this dialect and culture in their programs.
Y4Y: Knowing it has driven your passion as an advocate, can you share a little about your own journey as a native African American Language speaker?
TG: As a native speaker of African American Language (AAL), my journey has been a very interesting one. I grew up hearing the language from multiple families and friends in my community. My parents spoke African American Language in my home, but there wasn't any recognition nor discussion about it at all. When I saw my parents interact with Caucasian people, I noticed they changed the way they spoke. What linguists are now calling “style shifting,” I grew up calling “code switching.” It wasn’t something that was explicitly taught to me, but it was something I learned from watching my parents and others. I grew up living in affordable housing in a suburban community. The people in my community mostly spoke AAL, and I had a strong sense of belonging; however, at my school it was mostly Caucasian people, so I had to do a lot of code switching, and I felt isolated. Having that home community helped me navigate through my differences and feelings of isolation at school, but when my parents moved us out of that community, I lost that support. This was my first experience with depression.
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Mrs. Tiffany Grant is currently Business Development Manager at First Children’s Finance. Prior to joining First Children’s Finance, she cofounded and managed a family child care program for the staff of Excell Academy for Higher Learning four years ago. She has 14 years of experience working in early child care settings, assisting in curriculum development, training, coaching, and compliance work for licensed, license-exempt, and nonprofit programs. A strong advocate for equity and inclusion, Ms. Grant spends much of her time serving on committees that strengthen her professional skills to create systems of equity. Some of her previous work includes serving on the Minnesota Legislative Task Force for Family Child Care and representing her state at The Public Policy Forum through the National Association for the Education of Young Children. She received her bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Studies with a career focus on early psychology and leadership from Metropolitan State University. |
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April 2 marks 230 years since the U.S. opened its first mint, in Philadelphia. Check out the many educational resources offered by this important institution of the federal government.
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April 4 is the 135th anniversary of the first woman mayor in the U.S., Susanna Madora Salter, to be elected. Read about the fascinating details of that election!
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Legendary inventor and businessman E. Joseph Cossman inspired the world to keep its eyes on the prize, having once said, “Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.” Tennis great, Venus Williams, famously echoed this sentiment, noting “I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.”
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(Photo courtesy of Anna Bialkowska from Warsaw, Poland, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons) |
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Topical Tool Kit
This curated tool kit will help your 21st CCLC plan culminating events that are safe, fun, and gratifying to students and families.
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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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