August 2003

Research has shown that kids who participate in after-school activities generally have better outcomes (better grades, less likely to use drugs or commit crimes) than kids who don’t. But specific data that can guide after-school providers, the policymakers who fund and regulate them, and the parents who select them are often hard to pin down. Among the elusive data is information on what doses (e.g., number of hours) and types (e.g., sports, computer training) of activities might have measurable relationships with what outcomes. And that’s not to overlook the basic, but daunting, task of getting unduplicated counts of kids in after-school activities.

Helping to fill this void in the knowledge of after-school programming, Mayor’s Time and Michigan’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program are uniting their efforts to create an on-line data system that will track and document youth participation in after-school activities, and allow for the analysis of the relationship between participation and outcomes.

“A year ago we applied for a federal grant to address data and documentation issues for after-school programs in Detroit,” says Dr. Grenaé Dudley, executive director of Mayor’s Time. “We wanted to create a system to track participation rates among various types of programs, as well as to compare that information with outcomes.” The outcomes to be analyzed include those of primary concern to Mayor’s Time (youth violence, substance abuse and early sexual activity) as well as interim indicators such as truancy and violations of student codes of conduct. The Mayor’s Time effort will target community- and faith-based after-school programs.

Mayor’s Time received the grant of $592,000, effective October 1, 2003, for a one-year pilot involving 100 after-school providers. Meanwhile, Michigan’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) Program, a federally funded program that enables school districts to expand and improve their after school programming, is now requiring schools to gather and report data. To accommodate this requirement, the Michigan program has been working to develop an on-line system similar to the one envisioned by Mayor’s Time.

CCLC and Mayor’s Time agreed to work together. As a result, a system is being built that will capture data from school-based after-school programs throughout Michigan as well as community- and faith-based programs in the City of Detroit.

“We’ll be able to take all those elements regarding dosage and type of program, and compare them to outcomes,” says Dudley. “How many hours of participation correlates to improvements in outcomes? If kids’ test scores are going up, do greater or smaller levels of increases correspond with certain dosages? Ultimately, those are the types of questions that we will be able to speak to with greater confidence after gathering and analyzing the data over time.”

Many partners are needed in order to make the information rich and informative, and to provide the connection between the input and outcome data. Detroit Public Schools, for example, will track and report attendance, test data and code of conduct violations. Wayne County’s Juvenile Assessment Center will report on kids in the juvenile justice system. Michigan State University will analyze the data and evaluate the effort. ThomasKelly Software Associates will develop the on-line system.

After-school providers will gather and provide the information about its programs and attendees, with unique identifiers to protect privacy. “We want to make sure that taking attendance is not a chore,” says Dudley. “There are different ways to do it, for example, a scan sheet or a swipe-card with a bar code. In the pilot year, organizations will take different approaches, and we’ll then work with participants to refine the approaches and see which ones work best in real world situations.”

The federal grant to Mayor’s Time will pay for training community- and faith-based providers to work with the new system; CCLC will train its participating schools.

How will the new system be institutionalized? Dudley says Mayor’s Time will continue to seek funding to make the system permanent. Already, though, all CCLC-participating schools must use the system. So as more schools seek to receive CCLC funds, they, too will become part of the system. In addition, there’s an ever-increasing emphasis on documentation and results in Michigan. This is evident in the rationale used in Governor Jennifer Granholm’s creation of the Children’s Action Network that brings together all of the various agencies that impact children and education, and by the State Legislature’s passage of the Michigan After-School Initiative that will develop a plan to create better coordination between after-school programs around the state, better outcomes for children, and accessible funding for programs.

“Many funders already require that providers show outcomes, but the new system will streamline this process and provide better, unduplicated documentation,” says Dudley. “The new system will make it easier for providers and will make the data more valid.

“Providers will be able to download information on their own programs, thereby documenting participation rates and the effectiveness of the program. We want providers to see that if you have documented proof, you have a better chance of getting funding – and it shows parents that you do good work.”

For more information on this website on Mayor’s Time, click here. For more articles on this website about after-school efforts, click here.