Overview

Site Visits

• Ethnographic Observations: Trained members of the research team visited each club to conduct ethnographic observations, typically two times a week, beginning in September and continuing through the end of the school year in June. Observers recorded detailed field notes after each visit (see Field Note Template later in this appendix). Each field note included the team member’s observations and reflections as well as an account of any conversations with youth or staff. The principal investigator (Hirsch) reviewed the field notes on an ongoing basis. Developments or issues that might benefit from additional investigation were highlighted for follow-up during subsequent visits to the club.

• Social Climate Ratings: Following each visit to a club, the research team member involved completed ratings of the social climate of the club on several different dimensions, such as cooperation and conflict among staff and youth enjoyment and participation in decision making (see Field Note Template later in this appendix).

All Youth Attending Each Center

• Youth Background Questionnaire: This questionnaire was completed at the start of the year by all youth at each of the clubs who were ten years of age or older. The survey included questions that asked youth for basic demographic information, their levels and history of participation in the club, how safe they felt in their neighborhoods, and whether they experienced the club setting as a “second home.” Each youth also was asked on the survey to identify the staff person at the center with whom he or she had the closest relationship.

Tommiana is a somewhat typical twelve-year-old girl. With a number of friends and some close adult relationships, including with West River staff, she is active and involved in multiple activities at the center. Dance is Tommiana’s favorite activity and is led by the staff person with whom she has the closest relationship. At the same time, Tommiana is moody, and in the middle of the year begins to withdraw from the dance program. Furthermore, Tommiana stops coming to the center for a few weeks in March, after losing to a peer in a center-wide competition. No one appears to follow-up on her absence, suggesting that she may have been somewhat lost in the shuffle. In this chapter, we will see how West River provided important support for Tommiana, but also had some costs. Her case illustrates one of the strengths of a comprehensive youth center, wherein relationships with staff can spread across activities and different PARCs can complement each other. Yet it also reminds us of the importance of the fit between individual youth and a program’s culture, particularly around issues of competition. Finally, Tommiana’s story provides a look at the missed opportunities for support when staff fail to capitalize on potential linkages beyond the walls of the center.

in the beginning

Tommiana is a petite girl who prides herself on being well dressed. She has been coming to West River since she was in the first grade and most of her friends also attend the center. Tommiana tells us that she used to attend the club every day. In third grade, she stopped coming as regularly because she lived further away from West River. She reports this period of lesser attendance as a “bad” event in her history at the center. At the time of our study, she reported coming almost every day but was observed at the center less frequently as the year progressed – something we discuss further throughout the chapter.

Youth programs can be found in abundance throughout our communities. Nowhere, however, are they more prevalent than in the after-school arena. The past decade has witnessed explosive growth in after-school programs. The federal government launched a billion-dollar initiative, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers. California’s Proposition 49 channeled more than 400 million additional dollars to after-school programs. Several major foundations have put after-school programs at the core of their concerns. And city after city is scaling up its after-school programs. Much of this growth has involved after-school centers that typically are home to a wide array of programs and services. These include the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which more than doubled the number of its clubs, from 1,800 in 1997 to 4,000 in 2008. Clearly there is a push to make after-school programs part of the educational and youth services infrastructure. We believe in the promise of after-school programs but also are concerned about the pitfalls. We have seen both good programs and bad programs, strong centers and weak centers. It is critical to understand the factors that lead to quality and to positive youth outcomes if the after-school movement is to be built on a solid foundation.

It is easy to appreciate the push for more after-school programming. This is especially true for the school-age adolescents in low-income urban communities who we studied in this research. These young people need to cope with violence and poor schools on a daily basis. Job opportunities are often few and far between. Adult role models can be in short supply as the middle class has largely abandoned these neighborhoods, many men are in prison, and parents often have work shifts that leave little time for guidance and support. After-school programs hope to step into these gaps and supplement what youth receive from family and school.

At this point, it is time to take a step back and consider what we have learned by our several studies of the Midwest after-school center. We hope in these mini-chapters – including the ones that follow the case studies of the other centers – to contribute to an integrative understanding of how comprehensive after-school centers influence youth outcomes. As part of this effort, we pay particular attention to distinctive features of comprehensive centers. Centers of this sort are complex organizations, and our analytic framework seeks to integrate both organizational and person-level factors. Grounded in the experiences of Pocahontas and Bill, as well as the organizational-level study, our objective is to abstract broader insights from those accounts. We therefore need to shift gears somewhat and consider what more general principles may be at work, which we can then reexamine in future chapters.

In Chapter 1, we introduced the concept of a PARC (program, activity, relationship, culture) to capture the multifaceted aspect of youth engagements at these centers. For both Pocahontas and Bill, this proved to be a very useful concept. For both of them it was critical to find one PARC that meaningfully engaged them. A meaningful PARC anchored their continued participation in Midwest and fostered developmental growth. Pocahontas found this with Manuel around math, Bill with Manuel around chess. In these instances, the person was an adult staff member; it may be possible for a peer to serve in this role as well, but our research was oriented toward youth relationships with adult staff, so we are not in the best position to address this question.