L.A.'S Best After School Enrichment Program
Carla Sanger, President and CEO
Tammy Sims, Communications Coordinator
Office of the Mayor
Los Angeles, Calif. 90012
(213) 847-3681
(213) 485-6606 fax

Back in 1988, recognizing that Los Angeles faced an after-school crisis, then-Mayor Tom Bradley made a bold decision. Although an estimated 100,000 youngsters were unsupervised after school, the public-school system was cutting back heavily on enrichment programs during school hours and slashing even deeper into the school district's Youth Services Division's after-school programs.

The city had no LEGAL obligation to provide after-school programs; but, Tammy Sims said, Bradley felt a MORAL obligation to do so. Accordingly, he came up with a creative financing arrangement -- directing city redevelopment money into the school system's capital fund, freeing money from its regular treasury to establish a new after-school program: That program would evolve into L.A.'s Best, a national model partnership among schools, city government, a non-profit and private funders aimed at offering youngsters safe and healthy alternatives to the streets.

Within six months of Bradley's mandate, the program was up and running on a pilot basis, a $2 million initiative in 10 city elementary schools. But there was good news and bad news, Carla Sanger said. A day-care provider and appointed member of the Mayor's Educational Council, a high-level panel that he set up to develop content and governance for the program, she went into the field to have a look at the new programs and found them, in her words, " ... not well-run. No talking, kids standing in lines, short fuses on the staff. It seemed more like detention than like any place where kids would want to be." She filed a report objecting to the process (and noting that the policy at that time requiring all staff to be credentialed teachers was ill-informed, keeping the parents of poor children from participating and locking policy into a bureaucratic model). Bradley responded quite simply, Sanger said: "He said, 'OK, come lead this program and do it your way.'" I said, 'OK, for one year ... and I'm still doing it.'"

Sanger opened up staff positions to parents and community members, and today, fully 2/3 of the L.A.'s Best staffers are non-credentialed -- and doing a great job. "I'm not saying that preparation and training and support aren't critical," she adds. "But the only venue for it doesn't have to be the college classroom." (The program's demonstrable success doesn't prevent continued attacks, however; traditional educators continue trying to reverse the policy to this day.)

From the original pilot program, L.A.'s Best has grown to a program serving 200 youngsters at each of 24 elementary schools, operating on a budget of about $2.6 million, of which the organization must raise $500,000 from foundations, corporations and other private sources; the rest comes from the city's Community Redevelopment Agency. Participating schools keep their doors open every one of the 245 school days in the academic year, from the and of the school day (2:30 or 3 p.m., variably) until 6 p.m., and find it hard to get the kids to go home then. Snacks are served through the US Department of Agriculture's Child Care feeding program, and programming -- specifically designed to provide enrichment, not merely an extension of the school day, ranges from homework assistance to special programs with a heavy focus on the arts, reading, science and frequent field trips. Field trips and special events are scheduled on many weekends, and -- despite the nervous warnings of "security" experts, district-wide events bring together thousands of youngsters -- and their parents -- in celebratory settings that remain incident-free despite the reality that as many as 47 street gangs are probably represented among the groups.

Four separate independent, rigorous evaluations over the years demonstrate the success of the program by many objective measures, ranging from grades going up and school-based crime going down to such less tangible factors as youngsters reporting that they like school better and teachers reporting that the kids are working well together.

It's a wonderful model, but it's still only scratching the surface: Programs reaching nearly 5,000 students in 24 schools is a good start, but the sprawling Los Angeles system has 415 elementary schools, of which 150 are clearly eligible for L.A.'s Best on the basis of poverty as measured by school-lunch eligibility. Sanger reports that it's tough to get major funding to expand the program because funders regard the program as "fat" because it has a strong base of city support. The money that the city gives, however, is all there's going to be; although the average cost per child is a thrifty $650 for the entire school year, and the output measures demonstrate that it's money well-spent, only about 1 of every 20 eligible students is being reached.

For now, Sanger's dream is to grow to only a fraction of that, doubling the number of participating schools to approximately 50.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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