State and federal officials announced plans Friday for a federally funded after-school program for Vermont students, hailing the move as a step toward universal after-school across the state.
At a Montpelier press event, Gov. Phil Scott and Sen. Bernie Sanders held up American Rescue Plan-funded programs as progress toward their common goal of universal after-school.
Both Sanders and Scott have made after-school programs a priority.
“I have never understood — if Mom is working, and Dad is working, and school ends at 2:30 in the afternoon, what do we do with the kids?” Sanders said. “You need strong after-school programs, and I think we are making progress in the state and hopefully in the country as well in doing that.”
In his January 2020 State of the State speech — two months before Covid-19 derailed the country — Scott promised a “universal after-school network” and pledged to give all Vermont children “access to enrichment opportunities outside of the current classroom time.”
Sanders referred to after-school programs that his administration had implemented when he was the mayor of Burlington “a couple of hundred years ago.”
“It was true then, and it is true today,” Sanders said. “If we want our kids to be healthy, happy, well-educated, able to go out in the world and be productive — that’s what we have to do for them.”
During the pandemic and the isolation it has imposed, both said, that need is even greater.
“No one could have predicted the pandemic and the impact it would have on our lives and the lives of our kids,” Scott said.
At the event, which was billed as a “celebration of recent success,” Vermont officials and the state’s 2022 teacher of the year, Karen McCalla, highlighted after-school programs that had taken place during the summer of 2021.
Through the state’s Summer Matters initiative, Vermont officials paid out over $3 million in grants to organizations for summer youth programs. Those grants, officials said Friday, allowed nearly 13,000 children to attend summer programs and created nearly 500 jobs.
At Friday’s event, children presented officials with capes that read “after-school hero,” and Sanders and Scott illuminated lights on a map of Vermont that represented existing summer programs.
Now, officials plan to use American Rescue Plan money — $71 million in total — to create a new program for the 2022-23 school year.
Scott announced Friday that he had signed an executive order creating an “interagency after-school task force,” whose job is to develop “a statewide system with choices and opportunities for our youth from kindergarten all the way through high school.”
The event provided few details on what that will look like, but officials said they hoped the progress would pave the way for a permanent program available to children across the state.
“Our hope is that this will be part of a multi-year effort to move us toward true universal after-school for all kids,” Scott said.
Correction: An earlier version of a photo caption misspelled Amanda Garland’s name.
