Kids Klubs: Six boosts for rural Idaho’s youth

Kids Klubs: Six boosts for rural Idaho’s youth

kids After-school and summer programs stimulate youth, provide jobs, engage communities

When Mary Schmidt, UI Extension’s community developer in Grangeville, worked with three Idaho County school districts to find the biggest need four years ago, the message was clear: After-school programs!

When schools closed at 3:15 p.m., there was little for kids to do. Larger than three states, Idaho’s namesake county—its biggest—is 83 percent wilderness. The only stoplight in the entire county is in Grangeville. So driver’s ed kids from Cottonwood (pop. 944), Elk City (158), Grangeville (3,228), Kamiah (1,160), Kooskia (675), and Riggins (410) all converge on Grangeville when they want stoplight practice. The county has a high rate of at-risk families and alcoholism. More than one in five children 18 or younger—21 percent—live in poverty. Despite 10 percent unemployment, 70 percent of parents work, so kids rarely find an adult at home after school.

Today’s story is different. Learning drivers still come to Grangeville for stoplight practice, and poverty levels remain, but each community now has its own vigorous after-school and summer programs for youth—with distinctive results.

It’s thanks to a $3.7 million federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant to School District 241, in partnership with UI extension, Cottonwood and Kamiah school districts, and Spectrum Consulting of Utah.

Combined, programs funded from 2000 through 2003 brought about $8 million worth of economic benefit to Idaho/Lewis counties; plus 181 volunteers donated some 1,700 hours and 52 jobs were created.

“Most are only part-time, but in this area, that can mean the difference between a family staying here, or having to move to a city,” says Schmidt.

Best of all are six after-school programs, continuing now after the grant has run out.

Of arts, academics, life skills, and fun
Step into schools from Riggins to Elk City today after school and you’ll find kids from kindergarten through 6th grade in a club house atmosphere, bent over homework, working on computers, cooking snacks in modern kitchens, studying llamas while preparing for a field trip to a llama farm, feeding the pet turtle, playing soccer, or even singing.

Grangeville schools recently lost their music program, so Kids Klub volunteers run the 32-member Choristers, for 2nd to 6th graders, who hope to record their own Christmas CD as a possible fundraiser.

“These programs have been excellent for our young people, no question,” says Grangeville Kids Klub coordinator Andrea Solberg. “We’re serving kids, yes. But also families. Now, when kids get home, their homework is almost done, and the family can spend more time doing other things.”

“Also, it breaks the isolation for rural kids, especially some home schooled kids who like a chance to interact with more of their peers,” says Elk City’s Delise Denham. In all of them, learning programs provide social, emotional, physical and intellectual development of youth.

In all six programs 2,578 students have enrolled in at least one after-school or summer program, with an average 100 students participating daily. School year programs run weeknights from 3:15 to 5 or 6—averaging 16 hours a week. Summer programs vary—daily in Riggins and Elk City, to week-long arts camps during July in Grangeville, where kids produced a play, learned to sculpt, and painted a floor-toceiling river of knowledge along an enormous school wall.

All sites offer daily recreation activities. One introduced soccer; three focus on summer swimming and basic water safety; others include golf, bowling, and a Better, Faster, Stronger program with children walking 500 miles.

Academic improvement; other benefits
By the time the grant ended in summer 2003 results were dramatic. At all sites, 99 percent of teachers “agreed or strongly agreed” that the program provided needed extra academic assistance. Idaho Student Achievement Test (ISAT) scores echo that claim. Of students regularly attending after-school programs, 91 percent improved math ISAT scores and 87 percent read better .

But it’s the less tangible results that please program sponsors even more.

“Statistics say an average 12-year-old child has less than five minutes of meaningful conversation with an adult each day,” said Joint School District 241 Superintendent Wayne Davis. “This program gives kids an opportunity to have those relationships with adults.”

“We think we are really raising the aspirations of our kids,” says Schmidt. One father on a Grangeville video, said it all with tears of gratitude over the transformation of his young son, troubled after his mom’s death.

“Our future depends on the support of each community,” said Grangeville‘s Solberg. “Each community has the ability to create what it wants. And that’s exciting.”

--Mary Ann Reese