Keeping the Momentum: Ensuring Program Quality & Equity During Out of School Time

Nikevia Thomas:

Good morning, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining the Complementing the School Day: Tools and Resources for OST Providers, or out-of-school time providers. Yes, please come on in. This first session that we have is focusing on program quality and equity, and it’s entitled, Keeping the Momentum: Ensuring Program Quality and Equity. We are delighted and thrilled and honored to be joined by Georgia Hall, who is a part of the National Institute on Out-of-School Time. So, I’m just going to give people a couple of moments to join in. Depending on where you are in the world, I hope that you are someplace warm or cool and dry. Where we are, there’s some rain coming.

So, let’s just move on to the next slide, and we can keep going. So, we are MAEC, and we are a champion of innovation, collaboration, and equity. You’re going to learn a little bit more about us later on. But in the interest of time, I’d like to go to the next slide so we can learn a little bit about you.

I don’t know if I said it, but I will say it again, my name is Nikevia, and I am a Senior Specialist at MAEC. I work on the Statewide Family Engagement Center and the Center for Education Equity, and we are putting together the webinar series that you are here for today. I would like for you to share in the chat your name, your state, and the entity that you are representing and the role that you serve there. So, if you can, please share that in the chat.

Let’s see what we have. Casey is the 21st Century program director, from PA. Nice to meet you. We have, I think, WCPS. Is that Worcester County in Maryland? I think that’s where that is. Anna from Maryland. Nice to meet you. Welcome. Oh, hi. A lot of Maryland folks here. I see PGCPS community school coordinators. Oh, wow. A lot of PGCPS community school coordinators. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. Oh, Pennsylvania is here. Washington County, that’s in… Oh, let’s change this. I hope everybody can see. Washington County, that’s Pennsylvania. I think that’s where that is. Hi, Samantha. I see Colleen. Nice to meet you all, and please continue to share. I won’t be able to get to all of the names, but please continue to share, in the chat, your name, your state, and the entity and role that you’re in, and we will greet you in the chat. Can we advance to the next slide? Thank you so much.

So, we’re going to go over a little bit of webinar etiquette. Please use the chat box to engage with each other as you are now, and we recommend that you click on the chat icon on the bottom or top toolbar on your screen. For this session, we’ll have a Q&A period, and that will be towards the end of the webinar. If you have questions that come up, you can please feel free to put those questions in the Q&A section, and we will be sure to answer them at an appropriate time.

Also, live captions is automatically enabled, and it should show up on your screen by default. If you want to turn it off, on your webinar controls, at the bottom of your Zoom window, select the Live Transcript or Closed-Caption button, and select Hide Subtitles to view them again, and then repeat step two and select Show Subtitles instead. Next slide.

Thank you. It takes many, many hands to make a webinar happen. I would just like to uplift the people who are working behind the scenes for this session today, and that is Allegra, who is a Senior Communications Associate at MAEC. Allegra is providing operations and tech support for this session, as well as post-webinar support. So, she will be putting together all of the resources that we have for the webinar. Then, there’s me. My name is Nikevia, and then I am the virtual event planner, and I will be providing support in the chat.

I would like to introduce you to our facilitator for this session, Jessica Webster. Jessica is a Senior Family Engagement Specialist and she’s also one of my partners in programming. So, without further ado, Jessica.

Jessica Webster:

Thank you so much, Nikevia. Also, welcome and good morning to everyone. We are so honored to have you joining us today. I wanted to give you a quick idea of what our schedule’s going to look like for today. We’re going to do our welcome and introductions, and then we’re going to dive right into a really compelling presentation from Georgia Hall, and we’ll end with some time for question and answer. So, please make sure that as those questions come to you, you put them in the chat. If they fit in nicely to the presentation, we’ll ask them right then. Otherwise, we’ll be making sure to ask them towards the end of the presentation. Next slide.

So, I’d like to give you some background information about who we are as an organization and what we do, and that’ll help us understand why we strive to connect and support all communities. So, MAEC was founded in 1992 as an educational nonprofit, and we’re dedicated to increasing access to high quality education for culturally diverse, linguistically and economically diverse learners. We envision a day when all students will have equitable opportunities to learn and achieve at high levels. Our mission is to promote excellence and equity in education, to achieve social justice. We believe that all students deserve to feel welcome, respected, and safe in our schools and in our community, and that they need to be provided with opportunities to thrive. Next slide, please.

So, this is a joint venture between two projects that reside here at MAEC. The first is our Center for Educational Equity, and that is a project of MAEC that’s in partnership with WestEd and the American Institutes for Research. CEE is one of four regional equity assistance centers that’s funded by the US Department of Education under our Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through that project, we serve 15 states and territories. I am a senior family engagement specialist on the CAFE team, which stands for the Collaborative Action for Family Engagement, and that is our statewide family engagement center in Pennsylvania and Maryland that is funded through the federal Department of Education. We apply an equity lens to family engagement. We believe that by building relationships among schools, parents, and community organizations, that we will be able to improve development and academic achievement of all students. Next slide, please.

So, this just gives you a sense of what our regions are for both projects. So, you can see who we serve and where we serve on these projects. All right. Our objectives for today. In the 2023 fiscal year, nearly 50,000… Oh wait, I’m sorry. I apologize. I was reading something different. Our objectives for today are to identify strategies for equitable out-of-school time programs, to gain knowledge of critical elements for monitoring program quality, and to explore tools and approaches for implementing critical elements with fidelity. This is important because this is an initiative of the Biden-Harris agenda for education, is to support out-of-school time. So, we are so excited to learn more about how we can do that and how we can create equitable monitoring programs for these out-of-school time programs. Next slide, please.

All right. So, we are so pleased and honored to have Georgia Hall with us. She is the director and senior research scientist at the National Institute of Out-of-School time known as NIOST. That is housed at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College and they specialize in research and evaluation on youth development programs, settings, and learning experiences.

Georgia is currently serving as a principal investigator on the technical assistant partnership with Massachusetts Department of Education’s 21st CCLC program. NIOST works includes development and refinement of statewide assessment tools for 21st Century schools, along with the development of online training tools and in-person training and technical assistance. Georgia also serves as a principal investigator on NIOST project work with Elevate OST in western Pennsylvania and leads the NIOST research activities for literacy skill building in out-of-school time programs.

Georgia regularly presents on topics related to program quality measurements and staff training to OST audiences around the country. She’s the managing editor of the After School Matters Journal. Georgia and her colleagues edited the recently released book, The Heartbeat of the Youth Development Field: Professional Journeys of Growth, Connection, and Transformation, which is a new volume in the series, Current Issues in Out-of-School Time. So Georgia, thank you so much for joining us today. Without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to you so we can all learn from your wisdom and expertise.

Georgia Hall:

Thank you very much and thank you to the whole team at MAEC for this opportunity. I’m really excited to be a part of this series and hope that I can provide all of you who are taking the time today to be on this webinar, provide you with some engaging, interesting, and useful information for you in your work. So yes, thank you for the slides and our focus is on ensuring program quality and equity during the out-of-school time. I want to just also just start with saying I want to hold the broadest definition of out-of-school time in this conversation together. So including before school, after school, youth development programs, summer programs, camp programs, things that happen when kids are on vacation from school, et cetera. So really the broadest application of that out-of-school time term would be great.

So let’s start with the first slide. So we are going to be talking in this time period about quality and equity, and of course those things are very intertwined and I hope that that will be very clear in the information that I’m presenting. I hope you can use the chat to add your own knowledge. I’m so impressed with all of the skill and talent and experience that’s represented in the folks who are here today. So I hope you can learn from each other, even if it’s through the chat, that you can learn from each other along the way too.

But quality and equity are very intertwined and if you’re going to have quality then it’s by nature, by definition, needs to be equitable. So let’s just first talk a little bit about quality. This is what the National Institute on Out-of-School Time, NIOST, where I am at Wellesley College. What we are, I would say primarily focused on in all of our work is about building quality and programs, helping and building the capacity of programs to be able to build high quality and thinking about it both from the quality experiences that youth have and children have, but also from the quality experiences that the adults and staff have who are delivering these programs.

So quality matters and why does it matter? Why are we talking about it? I think it’s first important to acknowledge that in a lot of things we have very different ideas about quality. So I threw these pictures up here as a way just to say, it’s still summertime, if you had this opportunity to take a vacation or to take time off, which of these ways might you spend it? So you might choose to spend it alone, solitary, and that could be a very empowering, wonderful experience. You might choose it to spend at a lake or with a friend, you might choose it to spend at a concert or at something where people are going crazy, wild, et cetera. Each of these could represent what we think about as a quality experience. So we all have different ideas about it and it’s a topic like that is something where people could have very different responses to it. Next slide.

We can go to the next slide. Thank you. No. One back. Thank you. So here’s an example of something though that I think might be a little different from that first example I gave you. I want you to think about what makes a quality read for you, a quality book. What would you say, if you’re going to choose one book over another or you’re standing in a bookshop and you’re trying to make a decision, what are the things that you employ, what are the things you think about before you pull that book off the shelf or you decide to buy that book? I just want you to think about that for a second and what goes into that. You can pop some things in the chat too, that would be fine. So if you’re choosing a book for today, choosing a good read, you want to have a good quality read, what are the things that go into making a good choice for you? What are the things that you’re thinking about?

Someone immediately mentioned the cover, what it looks like in the title. So there’s lots of different things that we might think about. I had this experience more than 10 years ago, actually it was probably back in 1999, my oldest daughter, who was born in 1990, so she was about nine years old, it was midnight and I was on my way to the Barnes and Noble. So I want you to think about that, that it was midnight and I’ve got two nine-year-olds in my car and we’re on our way to Barnes and Noble. You might be able to think through what book we’re going to get or what book within a series that we’re going to get. If you thought about Harry Potter, you were right, and it was the Prisoner of Azkaban that was coming out and it was going to be delivered… It was delivered to the bookstores already, but it was coming out at midnight or 12:01. Here I am with two nine-year-olds driving to Barnes and Noble to get that book.

I think about that when I think about what’s quality? What are the things that drove a gazillion children to want that book as soon as it came out and to start reading it? It’s some of the things that you’ve mentioned in your chat, the subject matter. Somebody had said Harry Potter and you were exactly right. So there we were getting that book. Next slide.

So Dorothy Strickland, who is a children’s literature and literacy giant, and a past president of the National Association of Education of Young Children, here’s the list that she provided, the top 10 things that go into making a quality read. You’ll see some of the things that other people have mentioned here, things like evokes discussion and it has interesting language and has universal appeal and it’s worth reading over and over again. These were her lists based on all her experience of what goes into a quality read. Interestingly enough, not the Prisoner of Azkaban, but when the last Harry Potter book came out, that in my lifetime has been the only book that I have read that I didn’t put down and stayed up all night reading. I know many of you maybe have stayed up reading a book all night. I had never done that in my life. It was the Deathly Hollows, the last Harry Potter book, that brought me to that experience. It had all these things in it, right? It makes you laugh, it entertains, it evokes discussion, interesting language, et cetera.

So the point I wanted to make here was that, in some things, and I’m going to say that out-of-school time program quality is one of them, we actually are very consistent and we have a good sense among ourselves as a larger population community of what quality is. So it’s not, as if in that first picture I showed you where we have these very divergent ideas about quality, we actually as a community of youth development professionals, et cetera, providers, we actually do have a good sense of what quality is. We’ve spent a lot of time researching and discovering what the definition of quality is and what goes into it. We can go to the next slide.

So back in 2004, our organization, along with others, did a statewide study here in Massachusetts. I know some of you are working in 21st Century programs and we’re very connected to the 21st Century programs here in Massachusetts. They were a partner in this statewide study that we did, and we visited programs all around the state. When we came out of that study, one of the things that we found are the things that are here listed in this paragraph. That is that programs that were in the echelon of what we determined to be high quality programs had these features. They had staff, some of those staff had expanded education, there were lower staff turnover rates at those programs. There were lower staff child ratios. There were good connections and communication between those programs and related community area of schools. There was a process of continuous evaluation and assessment that was going on and there was a variety of things that were content delivered and the program had very clear and established goals. So we came to discover that these were patterns and habits and features of programs that were of high quality. Next slide please.

So there are other things that are true about those programs of high quality too. If you look at the outcomes of youth in those programs, you start to see some of these things here. This was not just our research, this was research that has been repeated over and over again, that has shown the relationship between high quality out-of-school time programs and the fact that kids can actually show better improvement in school related to things like tests and grades, that they can show better work habits, they can show improved social skills, feelings of confidence, self-esteem, their attitude towards going to school can improve.

In fact, sometimes what you see also is that there’s a reduction in behaviors that, sometimes within a school system, might lead to times when they’re expelled or have to leave for a little while, leave the classroom, et cetera, things like that. So we’ve gotten to a point in the field of youth development and OST where we’ve been able to say this is what contributes to a high quality program. We’ve been able to say if you do that, then you can get to some of these things with the youth and children who are part of those programs.

Of course this is a huge place to get to in a field and it’s been something that’s been worked on for many, many years, but we’re really there and we don’t need to keep selling that. It’s very well documented that what high quality programs are and what happens if you can get to those. So that’s not a leap of faith there. But now the question is how do we do the things that help to get us to delivering high quality programs? That’s what I want to really talk a little bit about and to talk about that relationship to equity also. Then to give us some small opportunity to think about what are the ways we can look for quality in programs and how do we measure it and how do we talk about it? We can go to the next slide.

I first want to really just set a little background as to what goes into making a quality program. I’m sure many of you, if not all of you, are familiar with the word positive youth development. So I want to talk a little bit about that and what that is and how we do that in programs. Historically, I just want to also mention that where we started, in terms of offering assistance and providing opportunities to youth during the out-of-school time hours, a lot of that came out of the interest in taking care of and providing support to kids and youth when they were having issues and problems with various things. It was very problem related. So during the late-1970s and the early-1980s, there was a real attention to prevention and treatment. We were already able to know that the hours after school were very risky hours for young people, especially as women in particular went back to the out of the home workforce.

So they were leaving their work at home and going to work in other places. It left what was commonly called at that time, latch-key kids, so children and youth coming home to homes that were without adults. So these hours right after school, the 3:00 to 6:00 time, a lot of attention was being paid to this as a very risky time. So immediately the answer to that was how do we prevent problems, how do we treat high risks, and how do we install treatment through programs to be able to fix the problems that young people are having? So it was very, very treatment oriented around primary prevention and that was really the way the approach was. Next slide.

What we came to really understand from the late eighties through the 1990s and this term, which I only know as termed from the Forum for Youth Investment, so I’m going to give them credit for this and it’s a super way to phrase this, is problem-free is not fully prepared. So the Forum and other organizations really looked at this practice of prevention and treatment and came to the understanding that just taking away the problems is not enough. What we need young people to be is to be prepared for all the things that are coming forward and that we have to work across a full range of developmental areas and take into account all the aspects of growing up and young people and really be able to just help support them in positive ways, and less about treatment and more about support and building and working on top of the assets that they already have. So it was a really cataclysmic change from the former approach and theory of fixing problems to instead building assets. We can go to the next slide.

So positive youth development, if you’re looking for more definition about it, it’s a way to invest fully in all youth. So, problem-free is not fully prepared. It’s a way to prepare youth for everything coming forward. Here in the graphic you can see that it doesn’t mean these other things aren’t important and it doesn’t mean that we ignore the need to support youth who are struggling, who have issues, who are in obvious trouble, are challenged. We’re not limiting that. But that we do both, that we are supporting youth through those problems, but we’re also building upon the assets that they bring. So that we’re preparing them, we’re really encouraging and paving the way for participation and that we’re actually at the top of that pyramid. We’re power-sharing.

This P in this pyramid diagram is probably one of the hardest for us to do as adults working in the field, whether it’s education or youth development, OST, et cetera. The idea of power-sharing, and we’ll talk about that as we look at some of the data that we can explore. But think of this, this is the shift that we made over time from problem solving to positive youth development as a strategy and as a theory. We can go to the next slide.

The reason why I talk about it is that it’s really at the center of quality. Everything that we talk about as we look at quality aspects of programming really relate back to positive youth development. Here are some definitions that you can think about. You might have some of your own words or ways to define positive youth development, but these are some of the things that have come up over the research over time. Right in the center there envisions young people as resources rather than as problems. It’s a framework for how really an entire community can support all youth so that they’re growing up prepared, they’re engaged, they’re healthy, and they can develop to their full potential. So this was a really shift in mindset and it is the mindset that we want to bring towards all the work that we do in youth development and OST. It is the center of building quality. Next slide please.

So it was back in 2001 that the National Research Council, after tons of research work, came up with this list called the features that maximize positive development. I would say this really was an enormous bulleted list provided to the OST and youth development community. It was something that the field of OST and youth development was looking for. It came out in a book, which is called Community Programs to Promote Youth Development by the National Research Council. It was the defining list of if you’re going to deliver a quality program that maximizes positive youth development, this is what you need to do in that program. So a lot of the work that’s been done since 2001 is really on the shoulders of this list. As you look through it, I think you can see that it really covers so many important things, and that if I asked you to create a list right in front of you there or in the chat, you would probably be saying a lot of these same things.

So this was a huge shift again for the field to have this laid out for us. This is what we want to do, and if we’re going to build a quality program for youth, an equitable quality program, these are the things that we want to make sure are featured in that program. So everything that I show you in regards to looking at program quality really comes out of this. Our work, when I mentioned that Massachusetts out-of-school time research study, that was in 2004, so it really followed this list and was built on the research that went into this. Many, many research studies have gone on since then over these 20 years and have continued to point to these things as what makes a quality program.

That doesn’t answer the question as to, well what do you do? You know you want physical and psychological safety, you know you want opportunities to belong. So what do you do to get those in programs? That’s where we’re headed. And how do you make sure that those things are happening equitably within the program? That’s what we’re going to head towards. But I really want you to take a good look at that list and think about how this resonates with what you might have in your own head as a list of what we do in our programs, whether you’re working as a site coordinator, a director, or whether you are overseeing many, many programs, whether they’re in your state or your city, your community, et cetera. These are the things that we want to make sure are happening in programs. Next slide.

So back in 1983, this was a movie that came out, The Right Stuff, and it was following the journeys of the Mercury NASA astronauts. This would include John Glenn, Alan Shepard, he was the second… Well, John Glenn was the first to orbit the earth and Alan Shepard was the first in space. He was the second person, but first American in space. So this movie, it was a big hit. I know some of you maybe not even been born by then, but this was a big hit. What’s interesting about this movie is that it picked up on something that 20 years later we started to talk a lot about, and that’s social-emotional learning skills, which is kind of what this movie was about. It was saying these astronauts had something, they had these features, these special things that they were doing, they had the right stuff. Next slide.

So 20 years later we started to come up with all sorts of ways to say that same thing, the right stuff. We called it intermediary skills, we called it non-cognitive skills, we called it soft skills, we called it emotional intelligence, we called it resiliency. We called it 21st Century skills as we turned our century mark, we called it grit. But I think in a lot of ways it was different language, a lot around the same skills and the things we were talking about. It was these social-emotional learning skills. I’m going to ask you just to throw some things down in the chat there, and I’m going to take a peek as you do that. When we say social-emotional learning skills, when I say that and I show you this list of all these ways that we’ve described it, what are some of the things that come to mind?

So if you are responding, okay, here’s a social-emotional learning skill, what would you put in there? So for instance, I’m going to throw one out there, and that is communication skills. I would call that a social-emotional learning skill. Empathy, somebody put in. Thank you. Just throw things out there that you would put in that category of social-emotional learning skills. Having compassion, being able to cope, being able to adapt to different situations, having flexibility. You’re hitting on all these important things. What else? Self-awareness. Absolutely. Gets a lot to equity, decision-making, communication, self-control. Okay, these are all things that now after we talked about The Right Stuff back in 1983, we have come to think about what are these skills that we can do as part of positive youth development and work in out-of-school time and youth development that we are really good at doing? How do we talk about them and how do we package them together? So in the last 30 years we’ve started to really talk about this and move towards defining this. We can go to the next slide.

So I want to mention an organization called CASEL, which was founded in 1994, and really a huge leader on taking all of us on this journey into social-emotional learning. This is well worth investigating on your own if you’re not familiar with CASEL and all the tools that they have around social-emotional learning. Because doing the social-emotional skill building, as part of positive youth development, as part of a high quality program, this is really where we want to land. So there’s a lot of resources that are available through CASEL.

Their work has been totally focused on understanding the science of social-emotional learning, talking about the practice, and trying to really work on it nationally through the decision-makers and policymakers, et cetera, to put SEL at the cornerstone. It really has become that. It has often usually always been the cornerstone of youth development work, but now we see really in the last five, six, seven years how it has also taken such a more lead position in the work of your traditional education organizations, your schools, et cetera. Who, we’ve pulled them over from youth development and OST to say this is really important work around social-emotional learning and schools have been much more focused on it now, certainly than 20 years ago. So this is a great organization and resource to investigate. Let’s go to the next slide.

I want to tell you a little bit about some of the ways that they talk about it. Here’s a good definition and captures all the things that you have put into the chat around the different areas of social-emotional learning, et cetera. So there’s empathy, building relationships, attitude, managing emotions, et cetera. We can go to the next slide.

So here’s a big question. What practices do you think support SEL? In other words, what do we do? This is a great question as we roll out of the summer and move into another school year, again, where we’re continuing from the summer to do youth development, OST work, and meeting with staff and training new staff, and getting ready for a new school year, whether we’re working in community based organizations or we’re working in schools or working with 21st Century programs. It’s important to reflect and reflect with staff what practices, what do we do, do we think that supports social-emotional learning gain in our programs? What exactly do we do? What are the things as adults that we do in our programs? It’s a really important question to ask and reflect on with staff and think about what responses people bring forward. Let’s go to the next slide.

Here’s where organizations like CASEL can be helpful. They have a wonderful, what they call a three-legged theory about what social-emotional learning looks like in a high quality program. So here we get to a lot of the what do you do? So they break it into three areas. There’s program climate and culture, there’s explicit instruction around SEL, and there’s strategies to promote SEL. So you can see under each of these there are things that you can do. So to create a climate and culture, you can establish a safe place and supportive space. You can have routine procedures, you can establish group agreements and making youth a part of that, children and youth a part of that. You can meet up in circles within your program. You can have very youth-centered ways of working through issues, et cetera.

When they talk about explicit SEL instruction, what they’re really talking about is if we’re working on conflict resolution or we’re working on communication decision-making, that we’re really talking about that. That we’re saying we are working on decision-making right now or we are working on our communication skills. So being explicit that we are working on these skills and we’re working on them because they’re important for your future, for my future, for your progress through school. You’re being able to achieve through the challenges that are ahead of you. So being explicit about SEL. I work with a lot of programs here in Massachusetts and across the state that have goals around some of these SEL areas and things that you mentioned like self-awareness or empathy. But you really need to talk about those things very explicitly with young people so that they know that we’re working on those things and what they are.

So when you say we’re working on conflict resolution, they understand what conflict resolution is. Not just taking them through it and secretly working on it, but really working on it very explicitly. It’s really important. This is one of those three-legged stool pieces that CASEL is talking about. The other one are strategies around promoting SEL and they talk about three signature practices of having welcoming rituals, effective practice, and optimistic closings. So this gets back at reflection and the importance of reflecting with young people. If we want to build young people who are self-aware, then we need to make sure we are explicit about time for reflection and thinking about ourselves and our actions, et cetera. So again, CASEL, a really great resource about what SEL looks like in high quality programs and very specific as to what are the things that we do. Let’s go to the next slide.

So one of the things that we are getting at today also is about how do you know what you’re doing in quality building? How do you know that you’re working on the things that you want to be working on? The fact is, is that there actually are a lot of tools in the field to help you do this. I’m just going to mention a few and we are going to actually take a couple of minutes to experiment a little bit with one of these tools. I’m going to share a video in a little bit of a program in action and we’re just going to look at five minutes of just zooming in on a program taking place. We’re going to have a download, something that you can download and just open, keep as an electronic copy right there that you can look at that we can utilize as a way to look at quality.

But I want to mention that there are lots of tools out there. The Youth Program Quality Assessment, which is connected to the Forum for Youth Development, the Assessment of Program Practices Tool, which comes out of NIOST’s work with the Massachusetts 21st Century program here, which includes the SAYO, which is the survey tools, and then there’s the PEAR assessment, the Dimensions Of Success, known as DOS, and AIR has an SEL self-assessment tool. So these are just a few, these are the ones that I know of best, but there are others out there. So I guess what I want to say about that is that there are tons of ways to be able to measure the work that you’re doing in social-emotional learning and the quality delivery of your program and to be able to look at that quantitatively.

These tools are all tools that are quantitative. So it allows you to quantitatively and to quantify your work around quality and building quality. These tools are meant to be tools that are used over a period of time. So, for instance, if you are starting a program again in September, these are tools that you might… Or some other tool that you might use maybe in late September, October to take a look at your program and how it measures up against conditions and features of quality programs. Then you look again, after you get those results, you’re able to then think about, okay, well what are our strengths and what do we need to do differently? So how can we put in practice the things that we learned from using one of these assessments? Then we’re going to go back and look at what we’re doing in March or April.

So that’s just on like a school calendar, but you can make up that calendar based on the way that your program or the organizations you work with take place. The point is that these tools are meant to be tools that you don’t just use once and then don’t pay attention to again, but they’re tools that are meant to be a regular part of the work that you do in a way to continuously work on quality. So all of these tools, these are things, and you can certainly Google others also, but these are some of the ones that are probably best known in the field and have been field tested, verified, et cetera, are used in large, large numbers. So there’s a lot of field experience behind them. They’re all research-based tools also. We can go to the next slide.

So I just want to quickly mention the importance of quality and linking to learning in school. It might be that you’re connected to a school and you might not be connected to a school. You might have youth who are attending programs that you’re working with, whether it be summer camps or vacation programs or after school, before school programs that might not be connected to the school at all. They might come from lots of different schools. But if you went back to that list from the National Research Council back in 2001, connection and communication with schools is one of the things that’s really important. Knowing what the needs are of the young people who are coming into your program, into your community. This gets to a real important equity piece also in that we recognize the different ways that children and youth are coming into our program and that we are conscious and delivering to those needs.

So working with schools is important in the sense of being able to meet the needs of the young people and the families that you’re supporting. It also, in a way, validates what occurs in your program to be able to connect up the value added that you bring to that young person’s school experience. To be able to say you are working on social-emotional learning skills, we are working on social-emotional learning skills too. The things that we’re doing in our program are helping those kids be better math students in your class. If we work on presentations and communication and reflection in our after school or our before school or summer program, they’re going to show up in your classroom in better ways along those skills too. So the connections to school are really, really helpful and important.

Sometimes they’re impossible and that’s recognized, but where you can make them, whether it’s through the family or directly through the school, it can be something that shows a huge value added and certainly just again contributes to what can happen for those young people. So I put that out there as something to think about. Certainly if you have questions about that, you can throw some into the Q&A around that too or learn from other people through chat. Let’s go to the next slide.

So, this just continues that thought in the sense that we really work across learning settings and that high quality programs are able to be able to join those different settings together. So that includes family, that includes community, and that includes school. I think this is really, again, a helpful thing to think about as we roll out of summer into September, to think about what are the connections that happen between our program and those other settings, the family, the community and the school? How can we, as staff and as directors and program leaders or state leaders, how can we help programs work on making sure that they connect across all those settings? I know that family engagement has been a huge focus for state departments of education and for programs.

Coming out of the pandemic, connecting with families, we couldn’t place more value on that and the importance of that. So thinking about what makes a high quality program, a good part of it is being able to connect across all these different learning settings. So it’s something again to take back and think about with staff and programs, how do you do that and how can we do that better. Next slide please.

I want to take a look at an example of why we use data and how data can help us understand this notion of quality. So it’s always better to bring in data from different sources as best we can. So I’m going to commonly refer to as triangulation. So if I can get data from families and I can get data from kids themselves and I can get data from staff and I can get data from outside observers looking at our program that’s going to give me this great collection of data from all these different sources, that’s going to help me have a more balanced approach to understanding my program and knowing what I need to do to build the quality.

So what I’m moving here towards is how do we get this data and how do we look at it from a quality angle? We talked about that list from the National Research Council. These are the things that make up a quality program. So I want to ask questions to staff, I want to ask questions to kids, I want to ask questions to families about how we’re doing on those things. I can put this all together, these different things and I can have a sense of how high quality is the program that we’re delivering. So I think the next slide is some of our data that I want to look at. So let’s go to our next slide.

So here’s just an example. I just want you to take a look at this. So this is a heat map is what we commonly call it and you might be familiar with these already, but they’re a really great way to get a quick snapshot about how we’re doing in regards to quality. So the way this works, I want you to think of every horizontal line as a program. So there’s probably about 100 programs here listed. So this is the data from a hundred programs and this is from youth surveys. These are two questions. There’s a question about how supportive… Well there’s questions underneath this topic, but how supportive is the program environment? The second topic is how’s the engagement in activities and learning? This survey is asking youth these questions and asking them to respond.

So this is on a one to four scale. Now the four would color in the highest, the darkest. So where you see the darkest green, that’s where the numbers are higher. So youth are tending to give threes and fours and you can look all the way down, you can see all the programs at once by using this sort of a graph. You can see that these darker columns are columns where youth on average, in each of those programs, which are the horizontal across rated at higher, a three and a four, which would be very good and good, et cetera.

So I want you to scroll across, if you can read these topics, and I’ll name them for you. But as you move towards the right, you’ll see we’re hitting three areas that are lighter in color as you go down the column. Now there are some green horizontal slots and those are programs that are getting highly rated by their youth, but you can see there are some that are very low rated by their youth. One of these topics is opportunities for leadership and responsibility. The one right next to it, youth have choice in autonomy. So immediately in looking at this data, I can come away from this and realize we might think as staff and adults that we’re doing great work on some of these SEL areas like leadership and responsibility and youth voice and choice. But in fact our youth are telling us that they’re not experiencing it that way and that in their minds and in their responses, they’re not saying that they’re having lots of opportunity to share their voice and to make choices about things and they’re not having opportunities for leadership and responsibility.

Remember I talked about being very explicit about things. So it might mean that when I’m working with youth, I’m saying, okay, we’re going to work on our leadership opportunity today, we’re going to work on leadership skills. So sometimes maybe they’re not conscious of it, but they’re definitely not feeling it, right? We can look at those two columns and see that that column is very light. So youth are giving a rating on a scale of one to four, they’re giving ratings probably one and twos with a smattering of maybe threes and maybe a four. But for the most part you can see that the ratings are really down here. So here’s, using these tools, a way to pull data to let us know how are we doing on quality. Okay, let’s go to the next slide. This is just another really quick look at it. Let me go to next slide.

Okay, super. So here’s… Go back one. Yep. Okay. So just look at that fourth column there. Youth help select and contribute to running an activity. Now this is from an observer point of view. So this is using the Assessment of Program Practices Tool. There’s an outside observer coming in and looking at the program who has youth development experience, is an OST expert, and they’re saying in what they see, they don’t see a lot of opportunities for youth to select and lead or contribute to activities, which sits well with the youth experience of saying that they don’t have opportunities for leadership and youth choice. So here’s really just a quick look at how the data can be really helpful in thinking about what kind of quality program do we have. Let’s skip to the next slide and then I want to get to our video quick.

Well, we need to talk more about this, but I want to just focus a little bit on the equity implications of all of this. I’m taking this information out of a chapter of the book that we worked on together here at NIOST and with Jimena Quiroga Hopkins who’s at Thrive Paradigm, and she wrote our chapter on centering equity in OST. We can go to the next slide.

So I want to just show a couple of things that are important to mention here. That doing social-emotional learning work, it’s really the SEL skills that we talked about are intimately connected to equity. So if you have any chance of doing equity work, then these SEL skills are part of that. You can’t get to an understanding of equity if you’re not working on self-awareness and self-management and social awareness with young people and building relationship skills. So to work on equity is to work on these SEL skills.

Things like healthy identity development, we know that this is so important to young people as they get older and especially young people who are coming out of elementary school into middle school, it’s a huge time for identity development. So that’s something that young people need to be working on and being able to understand, feel good, and establish who they are and understand where they fit in, et cetera. So whether you’re doing that work through exposure or you’re doing that work through mentors or you’re doing that work through affinity groups that you offer as part of your OST work, it’s an extremely important part, again, of centering equity within OST programs.

There are times when we also need to think about how we target our supports towards young people who are historically in underserved groups. So making that a particular part of the work that you do and thinking about what are the needs that young people bring? I talked before about understanding the needs of the community and the young people who are in it. The only way that you’re going to be able to really support those young people is by understanding the needs that they have. So thinking about your population and how do you target support to the particular needs that your population has. So again, if you want to have a high quality equitable program, these are things that you need to talk about and to plan for as part of your program.

Addressing equity from the inside out. I just recently saw the second Inside Out movie and I love lots of things about that movie and about that story, but what this really focuses on is thinking about the assets that people bring within themselves and how do you help people work on their own progress and development and within your organization. So we spend a lot of time in the field thinking about the workforce, and when I say the workforce, the broader workforce, and what we want to know about people out there.

But it’s also important to know about people in there and about the staff who are working with you and what needs they have and what their experiences are, both in and outside of the program, and how do you help to elevate folks and how do you support folks where they are. Really focus on the inside of the organization and build out. Then we get to thinking about what does that broader workforce look like and making sure that we hear and represent everyone in the workforce. We just had a very large national workforce survey, The Power of Us, which that data has started to be shared and I encourage you to take a look at The Power of Us. Hope that that will be helpful information that was collected from about 10,000 people working in the OST youth development workforce. Let’s go to the next slide.

So I’m just throwing this out there quick to say we’re going to look at a video and if you look at this quick, you might first see these white chess pieces sort of, but you can also look at it and maybe see people two, four, five people bowing to each other. There’s multiple images here and depending on what you see first, but I hope you can see both if you take time to look at it. The point is is that we do see things differently sometimes, and what I want you to do is we’re going to try and see things the same as I show you this video. There’s also going to ask our folks at MAEC to just put in the chat to post the link to the activity section. I want to invite everyone to just open up that activity section and in the slides, we’re going to jump to 28 so we can jump to the video.

So we’re going to post in chat the link, just electronically so you can have it however you download things. Just have it open. We’re going to also go to the slide where we can access the video, which I think is around slide 28. So if we can do those two things, that would be awesome. So there’s the link to the document. This document that’s going to open up is… Yeah, super. Before we start the video, let just give you the background. You’re going to open up the document and you don’t need to print it out, just have it available on your screen and if you can’t open it, don’t worry about it. I’ll give you a little heads up as to what we’re going to see.

We’re just going to look at a four and a half minute video and if you open up that document, it’s an activity time and I want you to particularly focus on section B and C. If you scroll through that document, you’ll see it’s lettered sections and there’s a section B and a section C, and it’s about the nature of activity and it’s about staff promoting engagement and stimulating thinking. I want you to just take a look at those two sections, and for folks who are not able to open it, I’m going to just take you through it really quickly here for a second.

When I say nature of activity, I’m talking about things like, is this activity challenging? Does it stimulate thinking? Is there opportunity for youth voice and choice? So think about those things. When I talk about promoting youth engagement and stimulating thinking, I want you to think about what’s the climate that is set here from the staff and are they sparking and sustaining youth interest and curiosity? Are they encouraging youth to share control and responsibility? So promoting engagement and challenging, stimulating thinking, voice and choice, decision-making. Have those things in mind if you can’t access the document, if you can access the document, then look at section B and C. Okay, so we’re going to just zoom in, we’re going to pop into an activity here and see what we see. Ready to go.

Speaker 5:

All right. Josie, will you hand out one milk carton to everyone? Boys, shh.

Speaker 4:

Did you staple them?

Speaker 5:

I stapled them and they’re all very clean. I promise. Daniel, will you hand out one knife to everyone? [inaudible 01:03:33], will you hand out one plate to everyone? All right everybody leave their knife on the table. We need to be safe with these. So everyone should have three things in front of them.

You can have extra plates. All right. Listen up, sit down. Listen, boys and girls. I have cleaned all of the milk cartons with extra extra soap. It might be a little [inaudible 01:04:48] because I washed them today, but it is clean, I promise. However, we are not putting our mouths on them anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Let me explain to you how we’re going to do this first. Everyone’s going to get some graham crackers and we are going to be building our houses off of these milk cartons. So using vanilla frosting as glue, we are going to stick the graham crackers along all sides. You don’t have to do the bottom, along all sides of the mill carton. You can do the top two if you’d like. Then once you’re finished with building the outside of the house, you can decorate with some candy.

Speaker 7:

But [inaudible 01:05:27] frosting.

Speaker 5:

Yes. So nothing is going to stick to your house unless you use frosting for glue.

Speaker 8:

Then we take off the…

Speaker 5:

No, you’re always going to have the milk carton. It’s just going to be covered so you can’t see it. But your milk carton is going to be what you’re basing your house off of.

Speaker 9:

Is your gingerbread house, can it be as big as a plate?

Speaker 5:

No, it’s going to be this entire thing. This going to be covered in glue.

Speaker 9:

Can you also decorate the house with frosting?

Speaker 5:

Yes. So then you can decorate your candy, and stick it on with the frosting.

Speaker 7:

What do you call them? Oh wait, I think he has yours. He has-

Speaker 5:

All right. Does anyone have any questions? Yes.

Speaker 9:

Is there any chance of what we can do is someone can get us a little stool and glue it on with real glue so this can be a little higher because it will be annoying. Everyone was thinking that we’re going to be making big houses.

Speaker 5:

Oh no, we’re not making big houses. We’ve made these before in this activity. Believe me, they will look great. Listen, that was fun. We are not going to eat any of the candy while we are making these. You may bring your gingerbread house home at the end of the day, and if your parents say it’s all right to eat the entire thing, feel free. However, we are not going to be eating them here. It’s a lot, a lot of [inaudible 01:07:12].

Speaker 10:

You’re eating the [inaudible 01:07:13].

Speaker 5:

I’m opening the container with my teeth.

Speaker 7:

But also she is allowed to open them.

Speaker 5:

If you run out, I will give you more, don’t worry. We have plenty of stuff. I’ll give you more. So does everyone have what they need?

Speaker 9:

Yes.

Speaker 5:

Also, one more important rule.

Speaker 8:

Can I make two layers?

Speaker 5:

Listen, no. One layer. If we can follow the directions with not eating any of the candy, then at the end of our activity everyone will get to choose one thing to eat.

Georgia Hall:

Okay, let’s stop there. We can stop the video, Allegra, right there. That’s great. Thank you. I’ll come back to our slides if we can. I know I’m asking a lot of juggling back and forth. That’d be awesome. So hope everybody could… That’s perfect right there. Hope everybody could see that, hear that. Let me just throw out in the chat thinking about quality programming and thinking about the things that I mentioned, if you were able to open up looking at B and C, the nature of the activity, activity is challenging, stimulating thinking, staff spark interest and curiosity. There’s opportunity for youth to share control, responsibility, decision-making. I’d love for you to just throw some thoughts into chat. Your reaction to what you saw. I’m open to whatever you experienced in watching that. We just zoomed in and took a look at what was going on in that program.

It was just a four-minute snapshot. But there’s a lot of things that were happening there that even watching those four minutes we can come away with and saying, well, these are practices that I saw. These are practices that I didn’t see. I would love to get any of your comments in the chat about what you saw and what you didn’t see related to things like staff spark curiosity, that there was challenge. I know the kids hadn’t started doing anything yet, but I think you got a good sense of what they were going to do that things were stimulated thinking, that they had decision-making and choice. What did you think? I’d love to see some responses. You can pop them right in chat if you’re able.

So just looking to see if anyone has any responses there. Could have incorporated identifying shapes. Yeah, great. Activity was stimulating students could make decisions. Yeah, they definitely were going to make design decisions. They were going to get supplies. They were coating everything with frosting and they were going to get supplies to put on those little gingerbread type houses. Could have started with a discussion about the components, yeah. Could have had more input. She could have used an attention signal to avoid shouting. Sure, yeah. A lot of things there, right? A lot of things going on. Yeah. Thank you for these comments. This video, I use this video a lot, I’m always struck with the one child who wants to build the house on something because in his head he thought it was going to be a taller house and he has a suggestion of something and it’s a very creative suggestion and he also says that they might’ve misunderstood, et cetera. He talks about that. I always feel bad that his idea gets shot down.

Like that they could take it home. Yeah. A lot of good things. Use repetition and positive reinforcement involve the students in some decisions. From what I see, I don’t know that they had any decision in that they would make the house. So for instance, I think it was an activity where they were told we are making these houses. That’s always something that I try and talk with activity leaders about, really giving youth more responsibility and power around shaping activities. This is a huge part of quality is giving youth opportunity to shape and not just act and do, but to really be a part of deciding what that activity is versus just we are going to make houses today and here’s your materials. You do get to decide on some of the artistry about it, but we are going to make houses. So that’s definitely something to be thinking about. If we’re going to have youth choice, then how do we expand that choice?

I want to throw out a couple of, and I appreciate all these other… Okay, I’m just looking at parental permission around eating things. For sure. Teacher was having kids help by handing out supplies. Yep, exactly. It’s best to encourage children’s creativity and this is definitely a project to encourage creativity.

I want to point out a couple of quick things, really quick action steps in building a quality program and making sure that program is equitable along with quality. So here’s a couple of quick hits. Exploring opportunities for making things more rigorous and challenging by adding knowledge or skill building. So if you think about this activity, maybe there was some discussion about house building or just bringing some things in that stretch the skills of the kids. Most of these kids were old enough probably to be able to stick things on frosting. So how do we stretch their skills? It might be towards designing some of these even together or something. Be creative about it, right? Next slide.

Giving them more control of making choices. Shaping the activities and developing leadership. So somebody mentioned they were able to hand things out, that’s great. Maybe there’s a kid who’s built a gingerbread house before and could talk about it, or had some experience with something, or there’s some ideas on design, et cetera. Letting kids have more responsibility to shape the activity, not just be there and contribute in small ways, but really shape. Next one.

Encourage staff to do in-depth planning for activities. Somebody in the chat had mentioned maybe they could have a discussion ahead or they could talk a little bit about even the art elements of it. So having a little bit more of a deeper plan than we’re going to make the houses and here’s the materials, but really creating more around it, right? Expanding, connecting to things at home. Has anybody made anything like this before? Et cetera. Some kids may have zero experience in this gingerbread house building and so how do we make sure that we’re responsible to that, et cetera. Next slide.

Coaching staff about the difference between supervision and facilitation. I don’t know if you all recognize that there was another staff member in the video, so there actually were two staff. So what is the role of that other staff member? Making sure that that other staff member is part of the facilitation. It’s sometimes the case in a program where a staff member is totally on the side and it’s important in a high quality delivery to make sure that everybody’s actively engaged, right? Staff know their roles and the expectation around engagement. Let’s go to the next slide.

Adding more structure to unstructured time. So this is less connected to the gingerbread activity, but there are times in programs where we encourage kids to have unstructured time and we want them to have their own creativity to play, but sometimes there are kids who need structure. So from an equity point of view, there are kids who are going to be without a friend or not have somebody to interact with. So adding some structured activity options to times when it’s unstructured can be an important equity moment for many, many children. Next slide.

Creating opportunities particularly for collaboration. Part of The Right Stuff that we talked about that skill set is collaborating. We know that employers today are asking for collaboration teamwork skills. So maybe there’s an opportunity in this gingerbread activity for kids to work together. How they will equitably share the house in the end, I don’t know. But it’s important for us to think about as program leaders, how kids can collaborate more and how we can emphasize teamwork. One last action step.

And that’s regularly include reflection and open-ended questions. So we didn’t get to watch more than this four and a half minutes or so. But my hope would be that at the end of this activity that there’s a time setting the last five minutes aside to talk about what they accomplished, what they did, what worked well, what didn’t work well, how it relates to other things that they might be doing, similar arts projects, et cetera. But regularly including reflection and open-ended questions is a huge part of delivering a quality program experience. Let’s just go on to the last slides. I just want to share some other resources with you. We’re going to get to questions. We can stay right there.

These are some things that you can find useful. They’re downloads off our NIOST website and you can just find them. If you go to NIOST, N-I-O-S-R-T, .org. We published the Afterschool Matters Journal. There’s many years of journals. There is a search by topic so you can find things that just relate to literacy or just relate to program quality and they’re all downloadable there. All the papers are downloadable. There’s a coaching guide that I also reference here. Again, you can just go to the niost.org and search for coaching guide and access that. Next slide.

Just want to provide my contact information. Then I guess we can leave it there while we open up to Q&A. If you have some questions that you would like to get an answer to, if there’s anything that I can provide for you, any follow up to any of the slides that I showed, anything that you are curious about, please feel free to drop it in the Q&A. If you want to jot down that contact information, then we can take away the slides and just open up to the larger picture.

Jessica Webster:

Georgia, I’m going to put your contact information right into-

Georgia Hall:

Great. Thank you so much.

Jessica Webster:

… the chat for everybody so they have it. Oh, Nikevia beat me to it. Thank you so much. So much information and so much to think about. I was really looking at the activity time rubric and thinking about that as a great way to really think about the work that we’re doing and the pre-planning and making sure that we’re really looking at program quality. I guess my question for you, while we’re waiting for people to put some questions in the chat or in the Q&A, it’s really thinking about cycles of feedback. We’re really big on that here with parent and family engagement. Do you have some recommendations on how OST programs can efficiently incorporate feedback from both their students and their families, and obviously their staff as well? Because I’m thinking about as we’re doing these activities time, looking at that self-reflection is really great, but also making sure we’re balancing that with feedback from our other stakeholders.

Georgia Hall:

Yeah, absolutely. I think establishing that as, you mentioned word cycle, establishing a cycle of feedback like that. When you think about program quality improvement, you want to think about it in a circle and that we have our program and this is what we think we’re doing and we’re going to deliver it. Then we start to collect feedback about it. We collect it from families, from children, from staff, from other observers, key people that we know who are important to our program, who can give us good feedback. We collect all that and we do that every three months or something like that.

So thinking about it in a cycle like that, in that we use that feedback, we schedule time with our staff, we schedule time if we have a board of advisors or advisory council or something like that, and we talk about what we’ve learned from that feedback. Then we think about, okay, how do we take steps forward to be able to work on the things that we know are not our strengths right now? What are the gaps that people have pointed out to us? So I think that’s an important thing to not just fit it in, but really to think about its plan, that feedback cycle and collecting that information is all part of the plan.

These tools that I mentioned, so the YPQA, the APT know other tools that I mentioned that are out there, these can all be used as self-reflection tools also. They don’t have to be as formal research tools. It can be just a tool that you use to think about your own programs and whether you’re a program director or you manage multiple programs. You yourself can go and use these tools just as a framework to say, okay, let me just visit and think about these things while I visit and watch programs in action.

All of these tools you can get formal training on, but you can also just use them as a way to self-assess and think about what do we do, what do we do well? These tools represent high quality practice in the OST field. So how can we get to do the things that are listed in these tools? These tools all grow out of that National Research Council list from 20 plus years ago. These are the practices. These are the things that you do in tools to get to those youth outcomes. So how can we do them better? These tools are about quality, they’re about equity, and they’re a great avenue towards building the quality of programs.

I see something in the chat about what is the best way to determine the best SEL to start with in groups of second and fifth grade. So I think this really goes to what do you think the needs of the youth are? There are tools that you can use to assess where kids are right now with social-emotional learning skills. Then you can say, okay, well this group of kids seem to be really strong in these SEL skills, but what about the others? So maybe we can work on some of the other things.

I think it’s also, and this is something to gather from families too. You could provide families, these are SEL skills and we know that we can work on some of these. What ones would you prioritize as a family? Working with the school, the schools have priorities around SEL skills now too. They might be saying, we really are working on building relationships. That’s what we want our kids to be doing, especially after coming out of the pandemic where they had such little time together. We want them to build on relationships. So as an after school program or a summer program, let’s really work on building relationship skills and let’s measure that by using some of these tools to measure relationship skill building.

You can look at it from a practice point of view. What do we do in our programs to help kids build skills? You can look at it from assessment of skill building from program staff or teachers can do assessments like that and there are assessments available, again, in the field that you can explore. Yeah, so I think the best way to think about where to start is by assessing where your kids are and by finding out, whether from the kids or from families or from schools, what are their strengths and what are their gaps? Don’t take on more than you can reasonably handle, you shouldn’t be working and trying to work on all 12 or 13 SEL skills at the same time. Pick out, based on what you do well in your program, what are the skills that are connected to that? That’s what you want to work on and that’s what you want to measure.

Jessica Webster:

Words of wisdom. I think sometimes we do take on too many things at once and trying to figure out what fits in and what can we tweak and build on what our strengths are to begin with is super important for sustainable success. I think that’s very true. Thank you so much Georgia. We are going to just take a couple of minutes to close out. That was a really fast hour and a half that we spent.

Georgia Hall:

I packed a lot in there, so I’m sorry if it was a little overwhelming at times.

Jessica Webster:

No. It was amazing. We have put in all of the links for you so that you can look at these. As Georgia said, if you have questions that were not asked today, or that you think of after the webinar is over, please feel free to do that. We also posted in the feedback an opportunity to give us feedback on the webinar because as we talk about cycles of feedback, it’s really important for us to get a sense of the effectiveness of the webinar. We do read them, we do look at those and take that feedback very seriously. So we ask that you please put that in. You’ll see that if you didn’t grab it off of the chat, you can absolutely grab it off of the QR code right there. So we ask that you take a minute and do that as well.

I think we also want to share with you some upcoming events that are going to happen. We have a session two for this series that will be happening on Thursday, October 3rd, from 11:00 to 12:30. This one, we’re really excited about this as well. We have some wonderful individuals who are experts in the field joining us to talk about amplifying family voice. You can find out more information about that when you register with the QR code or the link.

Finally, we also wanted to take the time to talk to you about an upcoming, our first MAEC family engagement conference, which we’re calling Connections. This will be a virtual event that will take place on Tuesday, May 6th. We’re very excited to be putting this together and host it. So you can find out some more information early on. There will be a call for presenters coming out. So we would love to hear from and have representation from the OST field as well during that conference.

So with that, we’ll put up the link again just for our feedback for this session. Once you are done, thank you so much for joining us today and we hope that as your OST school year program start that you all have a wonderful start to the school year. We appreciate all you do to support our communities and our schools and we look forward to seeing you all in October.