Reply to Aftercare in Elementary School: What should I look for?

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[quote=Anonymous]We're at Garrison in PK aftercare and it's going well. Similar to what sounds like the Cooke situation, it is free to everyone (amazing!) but because of this if you don't get on the list early you may have a few weeks of stress because they hold slots for low income families. However, we were told that there has never been a case at Garrison where someone who wanted aftercare didn't get in.

We've had a good experience so far with it--it's run by DCPS and there is a coordinator who handles Garrison and one other school, so she's onsite two days a week and is very responsive to parent inquiries and concerns. The teachers are two ECE teachers, so like Cooke, it's the same staff members who are in the school during the day and know the kids already. It's not our direct classroom teachers which is nice because we've gotten to know two additional teachers and our kid gets to be with different folks for the last two hours of the day--and our kid REALLY likes all of the teachers.

How it works: the regular classroom teacher walks the aftercare kids down to the aftercare classroom. They have a snack which is actually quite substantial--it's a hot meal and I think they actually call it "supper." They have playground time, and then they do a lot of arts and crafts and activities that we bring home (i.e. recently: making snowmen, making little handprint turkeys, etc.). There's a lot of singing and games--we're always learning new songs from the activities. They ONLY do screen time in rare situations like if a staff member has to go home sick unexpectedly, and in the one case where that's happened this year it was a PBS show. They also have a program come in a few days a week called "Jumpstart" which is a national, evidence-based early childhood program where they bring in a fairly large group of trained college students who work with the kids one-on-one and in small groups to do activities, reading, etc.

For the older kids, aftercare is totally separate and different--I know they have some formal offerings (orchestra, sports) and that it includes dedicated homework/study time as well as playground time, but I don't know much else about it yet.
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