San Francisco Chronicle 2017 Arts Cuts After School Programs
Open Forum: Gov. Newsom, our kids depend on after-school programs
Our optimism, however, was dampened in one case we saw his budget. While it expands admission to customs college and preschool, it left out a key entrada promise and priority he championed as mayor of San Francisco: after-school programs.
The good news: California has high-quality, publicly funded subsequently-school programs through the After School Education and Safety Program. The largest investment of its kind in the nation, it funds customs-based organizations and schools to create safe, enriching places for youth to go after the bell rings. This includes my organisation, the Jamestown Community Heart in San Francisco's Mission Commune, where 38% of our later on-school program is funded past the land, while 40% comes from the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families.
Afterwards-schoolhouse programs improve school attendance, graduation rates, social-emotional skills and health, and prevent substance abuse and criminal offense. They help working parents past filling a critical child-care need.
The bad news: After-schoolhouse programs are desperately underfunded. State funding of $eight.xix per child, per day, has barely increased in the past decade and lags behind program operating costs and the rising minimum wage (presently to attain $15.59 an hr in San Francisco).
Making matters worse, President Trump proposed to eliminate federal later-school funding. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, publicly decried the cuts.
Gov. Newsom, nonetheless, remains silent. This is surprising, equally being a father of 4 kids makes him, in his words, "more righteous about public didactics." And his agenda prioritized alleviating babyhood poverty, expanding later on-school programs and early babyhood education, and endmost the gap betwixt wealthy and disadvantaged students.
Affluent parents know how crucial afterwards-school enrichment is, so they invest in arts, sports and tutoring. In San Francisco, with i of the highest rates of individual school omnipresence, this is especially true. Low-income parents also want the best for their kids, and information technology is in our interest for them to have opportunities to succeed.
With no action, 1 in four after-schoolhouse programs in California could close their doors, according to a survey past the Partnership for Children & Youth. More than than one-half of the respondents conceptualize scaling back the number of youth they serve.
At the Jamestown Customs Center, similar to other after-school programs, nosotros have a long waiting list of youth who need our programme. Nosotros already serve more than 2,000 low-income youth and families in the Mission, Excelsior and Bayview districts.
We were built-in in the 1960s out of neighbors' want to provide a safe, welcoming place for youth as an culling to the streets. Today, nosotros offer programs before and after schoolhouse, including tutoring, youth leadership development, workforce skills, social-emotional back up and more. Nosotros have the largest sports program in the Mission, as well as an laurels-winning Afro-Latino youth arts program called Loco Bloco. All of Jamestown's programs are gratis for low-income families.
We serve young people like Jose (not his existent proper name), who came to Jamestown as a sixth-grader at Horace Isle of mann Middle School. The son of Mexican immigrants with an involvement in sports and science, he struggled to fit in during the tough adolescent years.
At Jamestown, he joined a soccer team, learned to write computer code, found a peer support group, and had a tutor's assist with homework. One time in high school, Jose was hired by our Youth Apprenticeship Program, or YAP, equally a teacher's assistant in Jamestown's afterwards-school program at the school he attended equally a child.
At Jose's high schoolhouse graduation, his dad told me that Jose used his outset paycheck as a YAPster to buy groceries for the family.
In addition to the scholarship all YAPsters receive from Jamestown, Jose received a full scholarship from San Francisco Country Academy. He is on track to graduate next year, and still works at Jamestown as a second-grade afterward-school instructor — helping the little ones become the same opportunities he had.
At Jamestown, we see the life-changing power of after-school programs every day. Gov. Newsom has seen it, too — that's why he was, twice, the keynote speaker at our events during his term as mayor.
An increment in state funding would open up upward slots for more youth in this metropolis, where the gap between those who tin can afford a hereafter total of opportunity — and those who cannot — is always widening.
We cannot let our subsequently-school programs wither on the vine. Kids in San Francisco and across the state are depending on us.
Myrna Melgar is executive manager of the Jamestown Community Center. She is besides president of the San Francisco Planning Commission.
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Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Open-Forum-Gov-Newsom-our-kids-depend-on-13793189.php