Out-of-School Time (OST) is supervised programming that youth regularly participate in before school, after school, and during summer break. These programs keep young people safe, provide child care for working families, and organize activities that help youth develop skills and improve academically. Sometimes, these programs are collectively referred to as “afterschool”.
OST in Iowa
Starting and Supporting a Program
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Congratulations on developing an out-of-school time program for youth in your community. Research tells us that youth who are engaged in high quality out-of-school time programming demonstrate greater positive results than their peers who do not participate. Some of these key indicators of success include:
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Improved literacy skills and scores
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Improved math skills and scores
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Improved behaviors
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Decreased juvenile delinquency
This toolkit is designed to assist programs who are starting from the ground up, programs that are developing out-of-school time programming from an existing source, and for those who are well established but need some additional support or fresh ideas to re-engage and reconnect programming. This toolkit can be downloaded as one PDF document or each section can be accessed individually below.
Individual Sections
IAA Quality Standards and Self-Assessment Rubric
This section of the toolkit offers tips, guidance, and suggestions for how to advocate for your program.
When undertaken as a whole, the Iowa Afterschool Alliance’s Quality Standards provide a foundation for providing the most effective afterschool program – a program that prepares all its students to succeed in school, work and life. The goal of these Quality Standards is to reach each one as best as each site’s ability, considering time and experience, program size, number of staff, available funding, building or location restrictions, and so on. The IAA has also created a self-assessment tool that programs can use to evaluate their quality according to these standards and then develop a plan for improvement.
Resources
For more information, please visit these sites.