4.4 - Turning Off the Television and Getting Active

Lucas was fifteen and at loose ends. He wandered over to the local Boys and Girls Club after school was out a few times and played basketball on their outdoor court. He wasn’t thrilled with shooting and dribbling around outside. It just wasn’t that much fun. Then one day he ventured into the building to play basketball on the indoor court, and his life turned around.

He was standing at the double doors between the lobby and outside, about to leave the Club for the day, when a staff person, Mike, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Can I help you?”

Lucas responded, “No, I’m just going to take off.” Mike continued, “What’s your name?”

They introduced themselves, and then Mike asked Lucas, “Do you want to meet some people?”

Lucas responded, “Not really.” But Mike further explained to Lucas that the “people” were teenagers and Lucas responded, “Oh really, well I could do that.”

Matt led Lucas to the Teen Room at the Boys and Girls Club. As Lucas walked into the teen room, which had teen drawings and artwork plastered all over the walls, he saw a whole bunch of teens hanging out, and knew he found a fun place to be after school. “In the teen room there were guitars and magic cards, talking, break dancing, listening to music, regular cards, just hanging out. Two doors open right off into the gym so we could always go out and play basketball. There was always an adult teen director back there with you so things didn’t get out of hand,” recalls Lucas.

From then on Lucas started hanging out at the Boys and Girls Club after school. At first he mainly hung out with other teens and had fun. He loved listening to music, playing on the computer, and playing the guitar. Then one day one of the Sports Directors, Neal, pulled Lucas aside and asked if he could help coach a baseball team of ten- and twelve-year-old boys.

Lucas pitched in. Seeing he was doing well, Mike, the Team Director started getting Lucas more involved in the Keystone program, a high school community service program that does a wide variety of activities including tutoring students, setting up community events like car washes, and helping organize Teen Dance Nights every other Friday.

This is when Lucas’ life really started to change for the better, “I was tutoring younger kids, and from doing that it motivated me to do better. I was telling all these kids to work better and harder, but I wasn’t doing it myself so I figured I’d be a role model,” recalls Lucas. He continues, “Honestly I don’t think I would have graduated from high school. When I got there in ninth grade I wasn’t taking my studies very seriously. I slowly started taking my studies more seriously and ended up in the Running Start program where I started college in my senior year of high school.”

The Boys and Girls Club that Lucas attended has an Education Director who caters to up to fifty kids a week for tutoring, and regularly sets up times with older students or volunteers to work more extensively with a young child to give them extra academic help. They also have a “Power Hour” from 4 P.M. until 5 P.M. every weekday, which is a time when every kid in system does homework. After that it’s back to activities, fun, and games.

This after school program made a huge difference in Lucas’s life, he says, because, “I was spending every afternoon at the Club. It was a place of belonging and really was a second family.” Lucas lives with his mom, and she has to work full-time to support them both. She can’t be around after school.

Before Lucas found the Boys and Girls Club, he was home alone until 6 P.M. or 7 P.M. every weeknight, and he’d been doing this since about the fifth grade. “It’s hard to just be alone all the time. If I weren’t at the Boys and Girls Club I would be home— not doing homework, but playing video games, playing with my dogs, or watching movies.”

Studies show kids who go to formal after school programs watch less television, and have higher academic achievement as well as better social adjustment.²⁴ These advantages, combined with the fact that the peak time for juvenile crime is right after school gets out,²⁵ makes a compelling case for after school care options.

Communities are dealing with the need for after school care in many different ways. Several national organizations with local chapters have stepped up to the plate, including the Boys and Girls Club and the YMCA. Many public schools provide after school curriculum and enhancement, as do some private schools. Often local churches and other nonprofit organizations step in to fill the void in after school programs in communities across America. Yet while there are countless creative ways communities are reaching out to children in the late afternoon hours, there still aren’t enough programs.

Right now, too few children have after school care. More than 40,000 kindergarteners are home alone after school, with a total of more than 14,000,000 kindergarteners through twelfth grade kids on their own after school without supervision.²⁶

“The reality is that most parents work. So kids need a place to go after school where they are safe and stimulated,” says Jodi Grant, Executive Director of the After School Alliance. “The truth is that even for families that have one parent at home, after school programs build social and other skills that they don’t learn during the day.” She comments that skills involving team work, dancing, drama, arts and crafts, physical fitness, and music are often highlighted in after school programs in ways that they can’t be during the school day.

Grant notes that after school programs can be crucial, “For most kids, after school care is an opportunity to get one-on-one mentoring and run around, but for at-risk kids after school programs can literally be the difference between graduating and jail.”

Providing after school care to at-risk youth not only benefits kids, but also the community coffers. A study of the effects of the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002 found that every dollar spent on an at-risk youth in an after school program brings a return of $8.92 to $12.90, mainly due to the amount saved by channeling the at-risk youth away from a life of crime (remember the juvenile crime rate is highest in the hours after school). Providing after school programs to nonrisk youth also brings a return (between $2.99 and $4.05 for every dollar spent) due to, in part, improved school performance and graduation rates.²⁷

There are other ways after school programs can benefit children: Combating the epidemic of childhood obesity is one. University of Otago, New Zealand, researchers recently confirmed the connection between television and obesity, and further added to the data by finding that time spent watching television was a greater predictor of future obesity than diet or exercise.²⁸

After school programs provide a different way for kids to spend their time than sitting in front of a television or other sedentary entertainment. “There’s new focus, rightly so, on childhood obesity and the fact that kids going home and plopping on the couch, possibly with chips, can contribute to that problem,” says Grant. “They can instead go and run around in an after school programs.”