Lead to Opportunities for Youth with Disabilities Advisory Committee, 2009

Lead to Opportunities for Youth with Disabilities (LOYD) is an initiative entering its fifth year. In marking this point in the initiative, we have to spend some time considering where the field of Out-of-School time has come, where the disability movement is, and where these two distinct areas fit together or where there are new advances and learning that need to be reconciled.

Over the next few months, the LOYD Advisory Committee will be posting to BOSTnet Quality Environments for Youth discussing informally the issues of inclusion, disability rights, and developments in the field of Out-of-School Time.

Many of these discussions will help guide the fifth All Means All Conference as well as inform the work BOSTnet is currently doing with its cohort of programs receiving on-site support from BOSTnet. LOYD Advisory Committee will also inform the coming BOSTnet Roundtable event on Inclusion.

Our discussions will also include comments from members of the field and interested parties. Often committee work and the important conversations that lead to setting directions or assisting with actionable plans are held between the confines of whatever meeting spaces these committees convene.

Here, the LOYD committee will meet in the public green of the virtual world, where anyone, anywhere, can enter into the informal discussion or be appraised of the latest thoughts as we move ahead refining our ideas or just thinking aloud. We look forward to this work and the impact on children in Massachusetts, Boston, and wherever children of all abilities require quality places to grow and thrive.

Project-Based Learning?

This next month, BOSTnet will focus on Project-Based Learning. The idea of Project-Based Learning (PBL) has been around for a number of years and has its roots in progressive education - a formula that seems for the time being out of fashion.

In this age of MCAS and increased testing, improvement rubrics imposed for the best intentions but often resulting in a decrease in the quality of life for young people - even if there is am improvement in their test scores - there has been pressure on programs to assume more of a teaching capacity and to do so in alignment with the school day and increasingly using the tools and techniques of the school day rather than exploring how our Out-of-School time field can provide a unique developmental setting.

People at the ground level - those who work with children - are increasingly saying their children are stressed and tired by the time they get to their program. More staff are commenting aside that they are feeling overwhelmed by their programs shift towards formal academics and competing with the extend school day movement.

What are program staff to do? Can they be told to teach and not be compensated and trained as teachers? How are programs going to respond when it appears the next fad is to extend the school day and funding and opportunities all - for this moment - point them in this direction?

Schools perhaps can benefit from a more project-based approach (non-parochial private schools and home-schoolers/ unschoolers apply this method successfully) while programs can always use additional resources to attract and retain staff, additional educational materials, and sustained and sequenced training to get the most out of the kind of staff who work in Out-of-School Time.

Our next Roundtable will explore Project-Based Learning in detail and present an easy to use framework that programs can use to retain or expand the type of learning they do - even if that learning is digging for worms and asking big questions rather than memorizing hard answers and increased worksheets.

You can sign up to be part of this training and learn more about BOSTnet's professional development Roundtable Series HERE or at www.bostnet.org

Uncertainty in Back to School Ritual

Rather than Labor Day, "back to school" sales mark the unofficial end of summer. The two lazy weeks of August are spent with stores pulling out the unsold flip-flops and towels and filling them with child-friendly office supplies, organizers, and sundry trinkets of learning. College age people disappear from the general population, from keeping watch at cash registers and serving at local restaurants and amass at designated "college towns" where they won't be seen until next summer. Teachers vanish into their rooms with cans of paint and their own brushes if in poor neighborhoods to renovate their classrooms and to stock shelves with new book orders in well to do areas. After-School also is ready - that is, scrambling to see if the vouchers are approved, the space permit asked for in June has been signed, whether there is staff, if the staff hired two weeks ago will show up to work on the first day or "call in" and handle a full mail bin whether paper or electronic.

Add to this ritual, the new uncertainty. There are many crises in the world, and rather than these being far-off conflicts, famines, and troubles, these worries from a world away are all very close to home in our newspapers, on television, and across the internet. The economy is foremost in the minds of many Americans as they send their children to school. A mother mused to me over the long weekend, "We thought we knew what kind of world Fay was born into. But that world of thirteen months ago is gone and we're not sure what it has been replaced with."

The gloom-and-doom crowd are latching on to this uncertainty and compiling long lists of the erosion of rights as well as touting an end of the middle class. They point to bus routes canceled, further cut back on activities - but this time to pay for heating and lights rather than lowering taxes, and more students in greater debt for higher education. In some areas, this uncertainty is not new. In some areas the lack of resources didn't need an economy in recession - the gap was already there.

After School has always worked with little money, few resources, and an often pushed aside agenda of youth development when many districts see this time as a further addition to the school day of 21st century tests and necessary preparation for those tests. Like Chicago, where years of inequality is coming to a head, or New York City where year after year the state did not provide those schools with the funding they were due, Boston perhaps will also see in these uncertain times a good opportunity to examine the quality of resources for all children and see that while some children are having to do more with less now, many children have always lived in that uncertainty.

After School programs may find it harder to survive in the coming months. They may, however, be the programs that can be an example to others as to how to make the most out of the least. Like many people, we may have to just wait a few months and see.

Reinvent the Wheel

How many times have you heard an educator say, "let's not reinvent the wheel" or a variant of that statement? Often people say what they wish they didn't do. This statement would not be used so often if it did not describe exactly what goes on in the world of education (this includes out of school time programs as well as formal school time). Educators reinvent the wheel with frightening regularity. One reason may be that there is always an influx of new people into the field of education, and they may want to do things differently because of a host of reasons: not experienced enough to recognize the wheels invented by others, not told where wheels are filed or what box they are kept so newbies create their own, or in most cases, the old wheel is covered in the cooties of whomever came before (effacing the past was good enough for pharaohs and emperors, so why not managers and middle managers? ). The wheel is reinvented and then klatches of colleagues moan, "why did so-and-so think they had to reinvent the wheel?"

The other issue may be that of funding. Funding is measured and managed by a host of computer programs such as Razors Edge and a host of organizations that sell services to non-for-profits such as The Foundation Center, but computer programs and development consultants are still trying to uncover the thinking behind people, the heart of the funding community. These people, like all people, are human and act in often unpredictable ways. Boards of foundations follow their own trends, internal discussions, and while we don't want to lose funing to say it, a great deal of woolgathering. Patterns change, language changes in grants, and educators recast the same old questions to attract new dollars or interest. How often are long-standing programs or initiatives canceled or recast not because they were not working or were ineffective, but because funders had lost interest? The wheel is again reinvented, and again a room full of educations say, "there's no need to reinvent the wheel."

It can be said that all business needs to reinvent themselves. The consumer culture demands the new. Coke, New Coke, Old Coke. Same product, but different logo or tag lines associated with these practices. There are many who would say, but "New Coke" is different. They would be somewhat correct. It was a slightly different recipe. A kind of new metallic taste from the old one. The marketing did say "new" a great deal. Nevertheless, the fundamentals of the product remained the same: fizzy sugar/caffeine water in a bottle with a label and all proceeds benefiting the same company. And, it failed. If anything, the New Coke fiasco defined the term "failure" for years.

The same is true for education. Fads come and go. Initiatives have different names, create trainings, binders, and supports, but are often a reinvention of the wheel. The fundamentals of education remain the same while the games we play differ from year to year as our programs invent "new" only to then return to "old" - or in the marketing parlance of Coke, "Classic." Martin A. Kozloff of the Watson School of Education, University of North Carolina at Wilmington put cast the question in a harder light saying the "pernicious innovations in education waste time, money, energy, hope, learning opportunities, and the chances for beneficent outcomes."

The big question here is not whether fads occur, or if every new idea is the "New Coke" in education, but how much energy is lost in chasing the new and do practitioners uncover and discover new ideas or are we responding and reacting to demands from funders, policy makers, and communities of people disconnected from the daily work of education? How many programs, projects, and quality services are lost to needless tinkering? In a world quick to forget the past and move on, we may reinvent that question, and the wheel, for some time to come.

In the mean time, pour me another glass of Classic Coke.