Clinton parent Brooke Keith said her daughters love the district’s after-school program so much that they chose it over dance classes.
Clinton and Dardanelle were among 21 school districts that each received a $660,000 21st Century Community Learning Grant from the Arkansas Department of Education.
In Clinton, the grant will be used to continue before- and after-school programs for students in kindergarten through the sixth grade. The programs will start after Labor Day.
The Dardanelle School District will add grades six, seven and eight to an already-established high school program.
Part of the grant will pay for teachers’ salaries for the program.
Glenda Stagg, director of grants and federal programs for the Clinton district, said she received this five-year grant in 2008 and was successful in getting it renewed this year.
About 150 children in the elementary and intermediate schools participate, she said.
“Before school, we have them for about an hour, and we do a physical activity, provide homework help — tutoring — and they have a little book club,” she said.
“After school, we just have all kinds of different programs,” Stagg said.
Those include gardening activities, yoga
and, new this year, an archery program through the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
“The components of this grant are to educate the whole child. We don’t want it to be the same thing they do all day,” she said.
“It’s enrichment,” Stagg said. Different activities are offered “so they’ll want to come,” she said.
“We try to do some physical-activity things, too. … In our area, unless you’re in some organized sport, you don’t get a chance to do anything like that after school. We have a great PE building [that includes pingpong tables],” she said.
Stagg said a focus is STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“We’re really hitting that heavy,” she said. “We’re going to do the robotics for the younger children. They already do that for the other program [at the high school], and it’s been real successful.”
The same type of grant was received in 2011 for the high school, which has approximately 75 students involved in the enrichment program, Stagg said.
She said the enrichment program starts immediately after school, about 3:20, and lasts until 5:30 p.m. Transportation, if needed, is provided for the students to get home after school.
Keith, 32, said her daughters, 10-year-old Kinley, a fourth-grader, and 8-year-old Kamyrn, a second-grader, participated in the after-school program last year.
”They loved it. Honestly, they quit taking dance. They used to go to dance; they’d rather go to after-school,” she said.
“It helps them do their homework, which is really nice,” Keith said.
It also helps her as a working mother. A nurse, she is the trauma coordinator and stroke coordinator at Ozark Health Medical Center in Clinton.
“I work 8-5, so it’s really good for me for them to get out of after-school at 5. I pick them up about 5:15,” she said.
“Sometimes they play games; sometimes they do little craft things. They come home every day and talk about it,” she said.
Kinley said her favorite activity is the art, and that’s what she’s looking forward to the most this year.
Stagg said the children receive a nutritious snack after school, too, and try their hands at cooking.
She said the school partners with the Van Buren County Extension Service, “and we do a lot of little cooking activities — nutrition education,” Stagg said.
The after-school program started in 2005, she said, when she wrote the School of the 21st Century grant that was awarded from Yale University through the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.
“Although we do not get funding from them now,” she said, “we still are in the 21st Century network and collaborate with Yale by keeping their basic components of educating the whole child — academically, physically and social-emotionally.”
Stagg said the after-school program is a service to the city.
“In this community, you don’t have the Boys & Girls Club, or anything like that, so I really think we fill a need in the community,” she said.
Jamie Burris, instructional supervisor for the Dardanelle School District, said about 150 students in grades nine through 12 take part in enrichment before and after school.
“We had received this grant before, but it was only a high school program. At the end of the five years, you can apply to renew one more time. We actually wrote the grant to go down and include our kids at the middle school, grades six through eight,” he said.
“We have never had anything quite of this nature for grades six, seven and eight. Our program will run grades six through 12.”
The goal, he said, is to provide “a safe, yet fun, learning environment during that before- and after-school time period.”
“It’s open to everybody, but our goal is that we would target those kids that might need a place to go between the hours of 3:30-5:30,” he said.
Tutoring and extended library time are offered each morning from 7-8.
Burris said a healthy snack, such as trail mix or peanut-butter crackers, is provided each afternoon.
“Our enrichments are things like photography, genealogy, cooking, sports, anime, robotics — the list just kind of goes on,” Burris said. “We survey our students and kind of find out what their interests are.”
If students really enjoy an activity, it might be added for more days.
“We may take something off if kids aren’t showing up,” he said. “We have kind of a goal we shoot for — we want to have an average daily attendance of 125 to 150 kids; that’s our goal.
“If we have a week go by that we don’t meet that goal, we start looking at what are some things we can do.”
Sometimes that might just mean there were several other school activities, such as ballgames, that affected attendance.
He said an ACT prep course is offered at the high school, and “credit recovery” is offered.
Students who didn’t pass chemistry, upper-level mathematics, English or history the first semester can work to regain credit.
“Last year, we had about 50 students who regained credit in the spring,” he said.
Burris said the morning tutoring and library time started Monday; after-school enrichment will begin Sept. 15.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.