After-school program leaders and supporters gathered at the U.S. Department of Education Tuesday to plead their case for dramatically expanding the number of after-school programs throughout the country.
To lend a sense of urgency to their cause, the Afterschool Alliance released a new report called America After 3 PM that is billed as the “most in-depth study of how America’s children spend their afternoons.”
Among the “key findings” of the report that you can expect to hear after-school providers quote to bolster the case for expanding after-school programming: The number of children “unsupervised” after school has risen to 15.1 million – or 26 percent of all youths – since the Afterschool Alliance did its first report in 2004. Then, 14.3 million – or 25 percent of all youths – were unsupervised after school. Read more...