As we kick off 2024, we reflect on the incredible innovations we’ve witnessed in 2023 in the space of out-of-school time and expanded learning.
As California leads the way with its Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (summary), we have seen many districts re-imagining expanded learning and making fundamental advances.
Kudos to the California Department of Education and California AfterSchool Network for creating a fundamental and historic opportunity for change and advancement in education. For the first time, out-of-school time has sufficient funding, and districts are tasked to extend every school day to 9 hours, adding 3 hours of out-of-school time to support working families and adding 30 intersession days for summer and other breaks. Around 850 expanded learning hours are added to the 1,000 in-school hours. Districts are tasked to build a school outside of school.
With this tremendous undertaking to multiply the expanded learning capacity and the goal of closing the learning opportunity gap, innovation has become a necessity.
We have seen great innovations taking place in all types of districts, large or small, urban, suburban, or rural. In this newsletter, we gave a few examples as inspiration for all.
Visalia Unified School District (Tulare county)
Profile: large, suburban, 27,483 students, 67.6% socially disadvantaged
Visalia USD has created sub-departments of STEM, sports, visual and performing arts, and CTE for their expanded learning and enrichment offerings largely taught by their staff. They organized all of their programs into a single program portal and let families (together with their students) choose enrichment programs of interest. They also made the strategic decision to synchronize student data from their Student Information System into their Expanded Learning Management System to measure student outcomes and make continuous improvements. They have done meticulous work bringing awareness of the programs to families and ensuring easy enrollment with language translations.
In just one year, Visalia USD’s operations have yielded impressive and rapidly increasing enrollments due to both the desirable, choice-driven enrichment programs and easy, accessible enrollment process. They further collected family reviews; each of their sub-departments has received 5 out of 5-star reviews on average.
Bonsall Unified School District (San Diego County)
Profile: small, suburban, 2,117 students, 37.7% socially disadvantaged
Bonsall USD had YMCA supporting their extended care programs, but there were no choice-driven enrichment programs for their students. Enrichment programs used to be reserved for affluent families, but the ELO-P funding can now close this opportunity gap. So, the Bonsall team zero-ed in on enrichment. Being a small district, there is a staff shortage. So they embraced special-topic enrichment vendors that teach sports, chess, coding, science, engineering, music, dance, theatre, languages, and farming. To tame the operations complexity and reduce the logistic workload, they embraced modern online tools to have one system to manage all programs, including both YMCA extended care programs, enrichment vendors’ programs, and teacher-taught intervention programs.
In just a couple of years, the Bonsall team has built up a vibrant and organized expanded learning program almost from scratch with healthy enrollments, engaged students, and happy families. Survey results indicate that students and families deeply appreciate the new program.
Chowchilla Elementary School District (Madera County)
Profile: small, rural, 2,155 students, 88.4% socially disadvantaged
A key challenge of rural school districts like Chowchilla is that there are fewer community partners to help shoulder the tremendous expanded learning work. The pandemic has taught us that live, synchronous learning is possible and, for certain subjects, can be quite effective. Chowchilla leaders innovated by tapping into remote resources through live, virtual enrichment programs (in science, coding, video game design, math games, visual arts, and animation). They further use local instructional aides to organize students into classrooms to take the classes on campus. The instructional aides have shared with excitement that these live, virtual classes are very engaging, interactive, and students learned a lot. Like Visalia USD and Bonsall USD, Chowchilla ESD has also strategically decided to use one system to organize both their district-run in-person extended care programs and live virtual programs for streamlined operations, organization, and accountability.
What is your innovation story?
We hope these three districts are inspiring examples of reimagining expanded learning. We’d love to hear your stories, too! If you are just starting your innovation journey, we from 6crickets would love to support and hear from you!
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Keep innovating!
Happy 2024!
The 6crickets team