Out-of-School Time
Out-of-school time (OST) programs provide learning and enrichment opportunities for children and teenagers before and after school, on weekends, and over the summer. For working families with young children, OST programs also provide much needed child care. While participation in high-quality OST programs can benefit young people’s social, emotional, and academic development, and boost their physical activity levels, children and youth from low-income households are less likely than their higher-income peers to participate.
Child Trends aims to understand and improve participation in, equitable access to, and quality of OST services. We focus on OST programs aimed at promoting positive youth development, as well as those that prevent or reduce risk behaviors among teenagers. We have led large-scale evaluations, including recent work for the YMCA of the USA—for which we visited more than 100 afterschool and summer programs—and provided technical assistance (TA) to individual and multi-site networks of OST programs. Much of our TA has built organizations’ and programs’ capacity to identify, measure, and track progress on services for participant and participants’ outcomes; a video series highlights some areas of focus for our direct work with OST programs. We’ve also evaluated and synthesized research on integrated student supports aimed at providing social supports to students through both school-based resources and OST service providers. Finally, we have developed broader conceptual frameworks for understanding the pathways through which OST affects children’s well-being.
Our work has been featured in Current Issues in Out-of-School Time, and our research on equity in OST programming led to an invitation to speak to the Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs to share information about strategies used to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in youth-serving programs.
