Center for School, Family, and Community
Afterschool/Out of School Time Overview
NWREL has been working with out-of-school time (OST) programs since the beginning of the 21st CCLC grants, when NWREL staff conducted bidders' conferences for the Northwest region. Relationships established with grantees led to a variety of evaluation, training, and technical assistance roles for staff from NWREL's Education, Career, and Community Program. NWREL has conducted formative, capacity-building evaluations for 116 sites in 12 different programs in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, and from that work has developed a resource guide for evaluation of after-school programs (Out of School Time Program Evaluation: Assessing What Works) that is now in national distribution.
NWREL is also a key partner in the National Partnership for Quality Afterschool Learning, a national project funded by the U.S. Department of Education that began in 2003. The Partnership's goal is to build local capacity to provide rich academic content through engaging and challenging activities in OST programs. The Partnership developed a web-based Afterschool Training Toolkit, a collection of resources and activities to help programs integrate academic enrichment activities into their programming in six content areas: literacy, mathematics, science, the arts, technology, and homework help. Using a combination of research review and documentation of promising practices, NWREL developed the literacy component of the Toolkit.