Investing in Children's After-School Hours

This post was co-authored with Elaine Weiss, national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, and originally published on Huffington Post's Education Blog. Read the original post and share your thoughts with the HuffPost community.  

Each weekday from September to June, at roughly 3:00 in the afternoon, school bells across the land ring, signaling the end of classes for the day.  The sound that follows in many classrooms is familiar to anyone who's been in a classroom: books snapping shut, chair legs screeching on floors, and children moving on to their next stop.  Just what that next stop is varies from community to community, family to family, and child to child.  Some go off to structured activities with adult supervision; some go home to a waiting adult; some go home and are unsupervised; and some have no real option but to hang out in places where trouble is especially likely to find them.

In that first category are about 8.4 million children who are lucky enough to have afterschool programs that keep them safe and inspire them to learn, and that also help their working parents continue to work productively, secure in the knowledge that their kids are under the watchful eye of caring professionals.  Unfortunately, a much larger group of children—15.1 million—are left alone—no parents, no afterschool program, no adult supervision.

The policy challenge those numbers frame for us is obvious: We need to shrink the number of children left on their own in the often-perilous afterschool hours, and we need to invest in growing the number of children who have enriching afterschool options available to them.  Unfortunately, we seem to be heading in the wrong direction.

That's the inescapable conclusion from new research conducted for the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign by a team of George Washington University researchers.  The report focuses on state funding for programs supporting students who face economic disadvantages, with a particular eye on the effect of the recession on those programs and the children they serve.