For working parents, the hours between the end of the school day and the end of their working day provide frequent stress. After-school sports, tutoring, dance classes and the like are often expensive. So is babysitting. Children’s Aid, a nonprofit group, offers a solution through free, high-quality after-school programs for low-income New Yorkers.
The Frederick Douglass Community Center on the Upper West Side is one of the 25 after-school educational programs run by Children’s Aid. The center serves low-income elementary and middle school students, about half of whom live in a neighboring public housing complex.
During a typical day, third graders arrive at the center by 3 p.m. and receive a half-hour of homework help in classes of about 15 students. After that, they have two structured activities, each lasting an hour. These can include a STEM class, where they might build hovercrafts out of balloons and paper plates. They also have literacy class, where they practice sounding out words, reading aloud and playing word searches to improve their vocabulary. Other activities include gym class, art class, computer lab, free time and social-emotional learning class, when teachers help students learn to process big emotions and be kind to their classmates. When parents pick their children up by 6 p.m., the center leaves free books and premade dinners by the front door for the families to take home.
David, a 10-year-old from a Colombian immigrant family, attends the program — which is called after-school — with his 8-year-old sister, Maria. His family speaks Spanish at home, and after-school has helped him improve his English. He likes the homework help sessions because he doesn’t have time to do schoolwork at home, where he does chores with his mother and takes care of younger children in his apartment building. His favorite class is gym, where he plays games and runs around with his friends. “I love after-school,” he said.
David’s classmate Sammy (also 10) has been coming to after-school for four years. She said she was shy when she arrived because she struggled with English. (Her family also speaks Spanish at home.) But at after-school, she made a friend who lived in her building, which improved her English. The friend would correct Sammy’s mistakes without being mean about it. Sammy credits her friends and teachers at after-school for making her more confident. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up and protect people’s rights.
For more than a century, The New York Times has partnered with Children’s Aid to support programs serving New Yorkers in need, like the Frederick Douglass Community Center. This holiday season, we hope you will consider giving to this worthy cause.
A $1,159 donation to Children’s Aid engages a New York child in an after-school enrichment program.
