Time - America’s after-school system, long strained, has become unworkable for many families. A combination of stagnant and disappearing federal funding, care-worker shortages, and state and local budget cuts has led many programs to limit the number of spaces they provide or close entirely, frustrating working parents who have limited options.
In Utah, for instance, there are an average of 80 kids on the waiting list for every after-school program, says Ben Trentelman, the executive director of the Utah Afterschool Network, which works with programs throughout the state. That’s in part because programs are serving fewer students than before—around 17,000 last year, compared to 32,000 before the pandemic.
Funding is a major issue, Trentelman says. One statewide grant, for example, was broadened to become available to school districts for all sorts of programming, not just after-school, making it much harder for programs to win money. Now a program that used to receive $100,000 from the grant receives $10,000, he says.
Future funding is also uncertain. Earlier this year, President Trump froze grants from a program called 21st Century Community Learning Centers until mid-summer, which made many after-school programs panic that they wouldn’t get paid in time to operate. While they eventually received the funding, the president’s skinny budget released in May proposed consolidating that program with a handful of others and offering less money in the consolidated grant.
The Trump Administration has also said it wants to close the Department of Education, which is where the 21st Century funds come from, making providers even more nervous. “We’ve never operated in this type of environment where there was this much question about whether funds would be available or not,” Trentelman says.
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