5th Year Grantees: Closeout Training Resources – May 17, 2024
Training Description: This training is mandatory for anyone who holds a grant currently in its 5th and final year (FY20 grantees – those whose first year was the 2019-20 school year). Content will cover all requirements for your grant closeout.
If this is the fifth (final) year of your grant cycle, ensure you attend the Grant Closeout training on May 17th, 2024, and identify who will be a point of contact for required reporting to occur after July 1st. The link to register for the Grant Closeout training session will be posted soon.
Pitch Challenge for Afterschool and Summer Programs!
Young Entrepreneur Institute has launched Young Entrepreneur Pitch Challenge Out-of-School Time, a national pitch challenge for afterschool and summer programs!
We love pitch challenges! Here’s why:
YEI’s Pitch Challenge toolkit makes it easy to facilitate five 1-hour lessons that walk youth in grades K-12 through the process of identifying a problem, developing a solution, and pitching it. They don’t need to start a business.
The process helps youth develop and flex essential entrepreneurial mindsets and skills that will serve young people well in school, life and work.
The lessons and pitch event are an authentic way for youth-serving programs to involve businesses, economic development organizations, parents, community leaders and more. They can be guest speakers, coach students in developing their pitches, and judges at pitch events. Read more about pitch events here. YEI and VentureLab both have free pitch planning toolkits.
Incentives and supports for programs that register by June 15 include:
A pizza, ice cream or donut party for programs with six or more entries.
Every program will have a finalist for each age category with six or more students entering. Finalist entries receive $60.
Free consultation and/or virtual guest facilitator for one session
YIPPEE has many free products to complement out pitch toolkit including books, games, guest speakers, kits, and…My Pitch Challenge, which provides a consultation and $100 for prizes.
Coming soon: a media resource kit to help programs highlight youth and program entrepreneurship activities.
For more information, contact Marissa Wilson, mdwilson@us.edu.
All program staff and individuals that support families within Ohio’s 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC) program, are invited to share their experiences with family engagement in 21st CCLC programs by taking the Family Engagement Staff Survey. The survey should take less than 5 minutes to complete. Your responses will inform statewide supports for family engagement.
All program managers should have received an email on 4/15 with the survey link to complete the survey It is okay if you did not receive this email as you can access the survey using this link as well: www.bit.ly/21stStaffSurvey24.
Additionally, please share this link with other individuals that support family engagement at your site (such as site coordinators, teachers, volunteers, family liaisons, or other staff). The statewide evaluation team at UCESC thanks you for your cooperation in distributing this survey!
We want to remind you that your 21st CCLC Continuation Application is due by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, April 5, 2024. If you have not done so, please complete your application ASAP! The 21st Century Team will only be able to assist you if there is a problem with the CCIP prior to the 5:00 p.m. deadline. Once the CCIP system closes at 5:00 p.m., you will not be able to submit your application, and this may impact your future funding.
Survey Data Collections for the 2023-24 School Year
As you are closing out your data collection efforts for the 2023-24 school year, we want to remind you that there are four surveys that need to be administered before the end of the school year. Three of the surveys are for the statewide evaluation and will be reported on in the EOY reporting in December 2024 and the teacher survey is for 21APR reporting. Please see this table for more details on the remaining surveys.
Survey Data To Collect
Who needs to administer?
Who takes the survey?
When/where to report results
For questions regarding these surveys, please contact UCESC using this form.
The 21st CCLC Team has received a few questions regarding the teacher survey, which is in relation to GPRA#5 to be reported in 21APR next winter. The teacher survey is required annually – it asks a classroom teacher (or reading/math) of each 21st CCLC participant to note whether their student showed improvement in classroom engagement between the first and last day of that school year. It is one question. The yes/no answer to the survey should be recorded on the 21st CCLC program roster for each child for later tabulation.
The teacher survey is required annually for GPRA #5 – here is a blog post from last May in reference to the teacher survey. This has not been posted yet for FY24 but it is our understanding that there is no change in the measure.
CCIP is Open to Receive Grant Applications
The CCIP opened on Monday, March 4, 2024 to receive new and continuing applications for FY25. The system will close on Friday, April 5, 2024 at 5:00 pm. Please be sure to submit your applications by this time.
FREE Ready, STEM, Go! 2 The Moon: Inspirations & Resources for Out-of-School Time
Hosts: Ohio Afterschool Network, Montana Afterschool Alliance, Vermont Afterschool, Inc., North Dakota Afterschool Network, ACT Now Coalition, and Beyond School Bells Target Audience: School and Community-Based Out of School Time Professionals including Administrators, Site Directors, youth development staff, STEM specialists and enrichment staff, summer day camp providers and staff, and afterschool professionals of all experience levels, etc. Vision: A national alliance of afterschool networks are partnering to host a two-day virtual conference, shining a spotlight on resources, strategies and inspiration to boost out-of-school-time (OST) STEM programming. Sessions will elevate resources available through the Million Girls Moonshot Initiative, unique STEM program models and provide actionable steps for OST professionals to:
Introduce high quality curriculum options that challenge youth to problem solve with curiosity and creativity;
Increase equity in STEM programming; and
Implement facilitation methods to promote an engineering mindset and positive STEM identity in youth.
The virtual conference will provide opportunities for OST professionals to network with peers from across the country, engage with speakers committed to supporting others in designing enriching STEM activities beyond the classroom and ignite excitement to help youth explore STEM and all the ways it can inspire and set their lives up for success!
The University of Cincinnati Evaluation Services Center (UCESC) has provided a guidance document for the new workforce readiness student survey measures for this year found on the 2023-2024 Evaluation Resources page. This document includes the individual survey items to be administered to students as well as some guidance for why/when/how to distribute. Additionally, they will be providing an optional survey data collection tool that programs may choose to use to help track survey responses – this tool is simply a resource that may help with data collection. [Coming soon!]
The workforce readiness student survey items should be administered to ALL middle and high school students participating in any type of workforce readiness programming at the end of this year.
As a reminder, grantees are also responsible for administering the Family Engagement Survey items (see blog post from December 13, 2023). These survey items and guidance materials are also available under the 2023-24 Evaluation Resources page.
Please review the guidance document and submit any questions regarding these surveys to UCESC using this form.
The Starting Point Learning Center - Franklin County – Central Region
Starting Point is a first-year grantee partnering with the FACCES Urban garden and OSU Extension program, Urban Roots. This gives their youth the opportunity to experience hands-on and immersive learning that focuses on food, agriculture, the environment, and related technologies in their lives. Activities teach the youth about growing their own food, understanding its origin, and exploring various career paths in these fields. This empowers youth with essential knowledge and skills, fostering a deeper connection between education and real-world applications in the realms of food production, agriculture, and environmental stewardship.
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Connexion West - Fairfield County – Central Region
This is another new grantee operating out of Lancaster High School. The students at Connexion Club have been working hard on their entrepreneurship skills. Students are shown below taking turns “pitching” their products during individual presentations during afterschool hours.
In addition to entrepreneurship time, this program started a new yoga mindfulness practice provided by a local community partner! Students were well-engaged, given prompts for them to journal and reflect on their days and their movement. Students are looking forward to them returning.
Personal Testimony: Tabitha Palmer
Due to impending deadlines, there have not been many program shares submitted lately. I have been thinking about how not all of the good things that happen in the community take place at the school building or during program hours. For this reason, I wanted to share about some of my personal experiences that changed my life.
When I think of the categories on which we report for 21st CCLC, I think about where I fit in. I grew up rural, white, female, and with an ACES score of 4. I lived with my mom growing up – my stepdad was laid off on an annual basis from his manufacturing job and my mom babysat teachers’ kids to supplement our income. I attended preschool where members of my church were the teachers. I don’t know if my siblings and I were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch because my grandmother didn’t want her family applying for assistance – she sent us home with groceries bought on sale or with coupons every time we visited her. My dad worked six days every week as a mechanic and his wife worked in food service at a local hospital, so when I visited them I was usually responsible their son on Saturdays until one of them was off work. I have lived with grandparents, in apartments, trailer parks, and finally in homes that our family owned.
I loved my tiny K-12 school where I received praise and attention for my academic pursuits, so I never hesitated to join the extra-curricular activities that were provided at no cost. If it would create a barrier for me to attend, teachers/staff who lived nearby were kind enough to provide me a ride home. Participating in the local 4H club helped me make friends – one of which whose parents often took me to events at the two local colleges which exposed me to arts, music, and people who were different from me.
Back when I was in high school they didn’t talk to girls about the military. They didn’t talk to “good students” about the local career center programs. The push was for everyone who excelled in academics to go to college without the parent engagement necessary to ensure success (for first-generation attendees). When I moved to live with my father in town I begged to remain at my school, which required me to get my driver’s license for the commute. I began babysitting and working at the county fair until I was old enough to get jobs waitressing and bagging groceries. I enjoyed having my own money and transportation and became less interested in school and more in the opportunity to build relationships with my newfound freedom.
I took a few college classes for dual credit during my senior year of high school. I turned 18 very soon after and while I didn’t consider dropping out of school, family conflict led me to secure my own apartment. I watched scholarship offer letters arrive without any understanding of how the monstrous remaining balance would be paid. Even my full-time job at the local bank wouldn’t provide for rent and tuition. I had to complete a correspondence course in English to graduate as I didn’t attend my college writing course often enough to achieve a passing grade. The summer after, my working multiple jobs and keeping late hours resulted in injuries from a serious car accident followed by the loss of my jobs and my apartment – a debilitating depression set in.
During that time, a few people reached out to help me:
My high school drama teacher and their mother ran the local and state Ohio’s Junior Miss scholarship competitions at the local theater and hired me to be the director’s assistant for the events. I had the opportunity to work behind the scenes with many talented people of different ages and be around young women who had access to resources I wasn’t even aware of.
I began babysitting regularly for one of the local college professors that lived within walking/crutching distance of where I was staying. They sat me down and made me submit an application to The Ohio State University by the March deadline that year even though I didn’t have a major, didn’t have a plan, and certainly didn’t know how I would pay for it.
My former high school art teacher invited me into the classroom to help – I worked with some of the oldest students on advanced drawing/painting techniques and framed and matted artwork for the upcoming Governor’s Youth Art Exhibition. They told me that if I was going to college I should pursue art education instead of fine arts.
None of them had any professional responsibility to do what they did. These supportive relationships and skill-building opportunities were protective factors that changed my life for the better and helped me to heal from my traumas.
We talk about outcomes in 21st CCLC in terms of improvement in assessment scores, grades, attendance, reducing suspensions, and better engaging learners, but we must remember that these are only a few school-related indicators that you are addressing students’ needs. They are not an end-goal for which you should strive in your programming. Your needs assessments and interaction with individual students will show you what you’ve accomplished throughout the years of your 21st CCLC grant work.
Neither your participation data, totals for race, sex, or free/reduced lunches nor the ACES survey can show the effects of stressors outside your students’ homes like violence, poverty, or discrimination. Isolation and a chaotic environments still challenge students and their families post-pandemic. Be creative in collecting your own local data, be it quantitative or qualitative, if you feel something is missing. You probably have some advice or something to share that could have a positive impact on a child that will never be able to be measured in a survey – so we have to keep telling our stories.
We encourage you to share with other programs your innovations and successes with 21st CCLC programming.
If you would like to be featured on this blog, please email a brief description and any attachments/links to Shannon Teague at shannon.teague@education.ohio.gov by the 9th of each month.
Our office is happy to report that most grantees’ data was approved by the Monday, February 5th deadline. If you would like a copy of the approved data entered for your grant sites, you can download a PDF by clicking the three blue dots to the left of each site to expose the “Download PDF” button shown below:
It is a good practice to save PDF using a file name that includes your IRN and a date or “summer 2022” or “2022-2023 school year” to easily distinguish between records from each year of your grant cycle.
NOTE: if you entered data prior to marking a site “inactive” or entered values for a question to which you ultimately answered “no data to report,” you may see remnants of the previously entered data in your PDF. This data was not transferred to the USDOE’s 21APR website.
Reminders for grantees as they collect and prepare your summer 2023 and 2023-2024 school year data for entry this coming fall:
Use this worksheet to store your collected data and label it with the IRN, grant number, site name, and term to which the data pertains;
Administer student engagement surveys to the school-day teachers of your 21st CCLC participants in grades 1-5 at the end of the school year and keep them in batches by term/site;
Keep in touch with your LEA partners to ensure you have access to state assessment, grade point average, school day attendance, and in-school suspension data for both the 22-23 and 23-24 school years to report growth during the next 21APR outcomes reporting period; and
If it this is the fifth (final) year of your grant cycle, ensure you attend the Grant Closeout training on May 17th, 2024, and identify who will be a point of contact for required reporting to occur after July 1st.
Tabitha Palmer Transitions to Nutrition Team
The 21st CCLC team is excited to announce that Tabitha Palmer RN, BSN, PMP has been promoted to Education Program Specialist in the Office of Nutrition at the Department of Education and Workforce! Her last day as 21st CCLC Data Coordinator will be Friday, February 23rd.
Tabitha wants to thank grantees for their commitment to ensuring we met our annual goal of 100% of 21st CCLC grant sites reporting their data to the USDOE! Although she will leave the 21st CCLC grant team, her work in supporting out-of-school time programs will continue in her new role, ensuring compliance with National School Lunch, After School Care Snack, and Summer Food Service Program regulations at participating sites in Ohio. Tabitha is excited to utilize her expertise in both education and nursing in her new role.
More information is forthcoming regarding who grantees should contact for 21APR support moving forward. In the meantime, please help us congratulate her and wish her well on this new chapter!
21st Century Community Learning Centers 