After School

Its 4:00 — Do We Know Where Our Children are?

The Philadelphia Children's Commission calls upon all Mayoral candidates to help ensure that all of Philadelphia's children remain safe, thrive socially and emotionally and achieve increased academic success by investing in after-school opportunities for all youth.

The research on the importance of out-of-school time and the costs of school failure is indisputable. Philadelphia is developing a continuum of city- and system-wide strategies to support students during the school day, engage youth in safe, supervised activities after school, and to re-engage its older youth who have left school without graduating in new opportunities for success including the:

• Extensive integration of behavioral and physical health services as recommended by the Mayor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Children's Behavioral Health
• Development of Beacon, Extended School Day, Recreation center and other after school programs in distressed schools and neighborhoods serving more than 50,000 youth annually.
• Expansion of truancy and delinquency prevention programs
• The Disconnected Youth Initiative and Achieving Independence Centers in partnership with the William Penn Foundation and the Philadelphia Youth Network to support the transition of youth leaving foster care group home and secure care facilities.

Since Philadelphia began these initiatives in 2000, crimes committed by juveniles during the after school hours (from 3:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.) have fallen by more than 19%. In addition, over a three-year period, Philadelphia's after-school programs helped to save over $30 million dollars in child welfare and child care service costs alone. This did not include likely savings to the court system and other government agencies from these investments. Parents and all voters strongly support these efforts.

These efforts are demonstrating promising results and represent an important down-payment, but much more needs to be done. In spite of this progress, nearly 50,000 children in need of safe after-school programs remain unserved.

We call upon the next Mayor to ensure that every child will have safe places to spend out-of-school time where they can be exposed to a range of enriching activities and opportunities for their behavioral and physical health, social, and recreational needs to be met by prioritizing and sustaining the City's investment in these programs.