Aftercare availablity
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Anonymous
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We were shut out of aftercare at our charter school, and I’m thinking it is very unlikely for us to get a spot. The only alternatives are hundreds of dollars more a month than our charter’s aftercare, and have other downsides.
Is your dcps or charter shutting out kids out of aftercare? I understand just from my own kids that well over a hundred kids in our small school are on the waitlist. |
Anonymous
| Yes, they all have a max. Is that your only question? |
Anonymous
Are there hundreds of students on aftercare waitlists all over the city? This is for next year, not this year. |
Anonymous
This is inaccurate. I toured a dozen and a half schools this year preparing our lottery list and asked about aftercare availability at each one. About 40% of the schools (primarily charters, but also two DCPS schools) said that all kids who need it can sign up for aftercare (most of these calculate aftercare staffing needs based on interest/signups) while the other 60% of the schools (including all schools served by DCPS Out of School Time or whatever it's called) said that availability is limited and they have waitlists. |
Anonymous
| Our charter right now has at least 20%-30 of students on a waitlist. That’s my rough rough estimate from looking at the waitlists from my kids and guesstimating the size of the school. I think it’s way higher. The only other option is not that great. I’m just wondering if this is true elsewhere because we can’t stay without some aftercare. |
Anonymous
I’m OP btw |
Anonymous
Our DCPS has limited spots in the free OSTP program but enough capacity in the private paid aftercare for any interested students. The paid aftercare isn’t super cheap but is cheaper than offsite options. |
Anonymous
I still can't figure out your purpose. If your school has a waitlist, what does it matter if others don't? |
Anonymous
Because if this is a problem all over the city, it doesn’t make sense to leave our charter. It does NOT seem to be a problem all over the city. So I am going to look at other options for my kids for the following year. Our inbound school has lots of aftercare options, but I wasn’t sure if it was an anomaly. At this point I’m just trying to figure out if it’s worth staying at our charter. |
Anonymous
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Op again- it seems bizarre to me that hundreds of people don’t have options for aftercare for next year, and the school has put forth no alternative or other option for families. My coworkers in the suburbs don’t have this problem, and it seems from the limited responses here that it isn’t a DC wide problem either.
Again this is for next year. Not this year. |
Anonymous
| Our school has an aftercare waitlist this year but didn’t have one last year. We are on the waitlist and it didn’t matter that we are number 3 on the list versus one hundred. No one got off the waitlist because no one gives up aftercare. It’s a title 1 and it’s free. |
Anonymous
| So I guess to answer your question no most schools don’t have hundreds on the waitlist. But again it didn’t matter. We never got into aftercare being number 3. |
Anonymous
That sucks. We are in the 60s with one kid, so I doubt we will have aftercare either. And this isn’t good aftercare and we pay a lot for it, but I need it so I can work and put food on the table. It feels frustrating to me that it by April, you have hundreds of families scrambling for care, and the school is basically telling us to figure out alternatives. This is the third year in a row where aftercare is an issue. |
Anonymous
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That sucks, OP. We had that problem at our elementary school and they ended up adding another full “class” to aftercare so that everyone could get in. Also I do think some people have afterschool nannies.
We did not have this problem at our charter preschool— everyone was guaranteed a space. |
Anonymous
| Our charter does not have a waitlist for aftercare. The only time that it had a waitlist was 2021-2022, because it was hard to hire staff. |