Two weeks ago at Lake Junaluska, educators from all over the state gathered to discuss ways to help their students. This conference, though, was not for the regular classroom teachers, those who pull the 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift. These educators work after school, developing programs for that critical “gap time” between when children and adolescents get out of school and when their parents get home.

At some point in the future, I don’t think there’s any doubt that all public school systems in the U.S. will offer the opportunity for parents to have their kids stay at school well after the 3 p.m. bell rings. Today, many of these latchkey programs are more like babysitting than a continuation of the educational process.

That’s too bad, but times are changing. And Haywood County is among those counties with the opportunity to lead the way. Already we have afterschool classes that focus on education, enrichment and life skills. The problem, and the challenge, say these teachers, is that each program in the state is different. One of the goals of the conference two weeks ago is to put a process in place to change that, to keep the best of these individual programs while developing a new and accepted model for afterschool programs.

A dangerous reality

Funny how some memories from 20, perhaps 30 years ago are as clear as an October night in the Smokies. My mother and father divorced when I was young, so I was one of those kids who came home from school to an empty house. Mom worked, and most nights she wouldn’t make it home until six o’clock, and a couple nights a week it was 9 p.m.

I won’t embarrass my mother or bore anyone with the details, but my brothers and I were something less than angels during all that time on our own. I vividly remember doing things that I knew weren’t right, and only by several strokes of good fortune did we manage to avoid any kind of real trouble. For children in their early teens, that much freedom is almost certainly a dangerous thing.

As the children of a single-parent household, we were an anomaly back then. Things were changing fast, though. That was the era when the divorce rate was skyrocketing, drug use and petty crime were taking place on a lot of street corners, and the demographic landscape of the country was changing so fast that society was slow in figuring out how to cope.

Today, the numbers are familiar to most of us, but that shouldn’t make them any less frightening. According to a Census Bureau report published in 2003, about 32 percent of children in the U.S. now grow up in a single-parent household. In more than two-thirds of families with school-age children, both parents work outside the home (one has to believe this percentage will keep going up). Very few children spend any significant amount of time at home with a parent during the work week, a reality almost completely opposite from what we had 30 years ago. Fourteen million children return to an empty home after school every day.

As this fundamental shift has occurred in this country, we have not developed new schemes. Much of the attention on broken homes and single moms has focused on the need for daycare for infants and pre-schoolers. That probably should be our number one priority, but the length of the school day is also an important consideration. If all schools had hours that extended to 5 or 6 p.m. for families who needed it, a laundry list of problems associated with juveniles would either go away or decrease significantly.

What now?

What’s happening right now is that in North Carolina there is an organized effort going on to get lawmakers, policymakers, parents and educators to realize the need to bring afterschool programs under one umbrella. Doing so will improve the care students are receiving, helping to reduce dropouts, solidify the academic progress of at-risk students and help schools meet the requirements of the myriad state and federal testing programs that have become the litmus test for success.

Gail Daughtry is the director of the North Carolina Center for Afterschool Programs, which is now known as NC CAP. She was appointed by the governor and is working to elevate the importanceof afterschool programs. For a while she ran the successful Teaching Fellows Program that provides full scholarships for top students whoagree to go into teaching.

“Our lawmakers and others need to know what a high-quality afterschool program looks like. We can then use that to go after funding,” she told me after speaking to the group of afterschool educators.

When I asked her how many children in the state took part in afterschool programs, Daughtry was unfazed. She couldn’t tell me. That she said, is part of the problem, and part of the goal of this new project. She had just finished talking about NC CAP’s new initiative, a community-based mapping program that is being piloted in four counties — Haywood, Brunswick, Guilford and Durham.

The program sounds almost too good — involve afterschool students and other members of the community in designing maps whose demographics will reveal just how important afterschool programs are. In Haywood County Chris Lowe’s program at Canton Middle School will partner with Haywood Community College GIS instructors to help students develop maps. A research team from Duke University will also provide assistance.

By having the students create intricate maps with new demographic information, these at-risk students will suddenly be the owners of important and relevant information. The goal is for their project to bring together data from different sources that no one else has compiled.

Part of the project involves having the student give presentations to community groups. As this unfolds, the community will, hopefully, begin to develop some ownership of these students and their needs.

As this project develops, I promise to continue reporting on it and help publicize the results, both in the long and short term. If anyone wants to help, they can contact Chris Lowe at Canton Middle School at 828.646.3467. Or, check out the NC CAP Web site at www.nccap.net.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com.)