Description:
The "modem era" of out-of-school time care in Charlotte-Mecklenburg dates to the early 1980s, when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools began offering school-age child care programs. Prior to that time, proprietary child care centers offered the only available center-based school-age care programs, begun as preschool children started school and parents requested continuing care. There were also several churches which had offered loosely organized programs dating back to the mid 1970s, initiatives that waxed and waned with funding and leadership cycles.
For the past decade, Charlotte-Mecklenburg has had a limited patchwork of out-of-school time (OST) programming and support available to its 125,000 school-age children. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are the largest single provider of programs, serving approximately 5,300 children in 72 elementary and five middle school programs. An additional 6,000 children are served in other out-of-school time programs sponsored by nonprofits, proprietary child care centers, and houses of worship. There are also many part-time activities (e.g. Boy and Girl Scouts, library programs, Department of Social Services TANF "Voyager" programs) available to elementary, middle and high school students. Identifying and documenting these activities and the numbers of children and youth served is difficult; however, at least 3,500 children are served in such programs. Family child care is another common arrangement for children of working parents; approximately 300 family child care homes that serve school-age children are currently
listed in the Child Care Resources Inc. (CCRI) referral database.
Many children are either waiting for fee support in order to attend a program, or their after school activities are not captured by any existing data source. Child Care Resources development and maintenance, and child care programs. The Foundation contracted with NIOST and CCRI to implement the Project on Out-of-School Time (POST).
POST began in April, 1999 as a community planning project designed to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and capacities of the existing programs, organizations, and infrastructure in the county to support children's OST. For the purposes of the POST Initiative, the targeted population was children and youth between the ages of 5 and 18.
"Out-of-school time" was defined to include the hours before and after school, weekends, school holidays, teacher workdays and summer.
This final report focuses on formal after school programs for children between the ages of 5 and 14. However, efforts were made to include information on informal both activities for all ages during all time periods and on issues for older youth. The community-driven
planning process was guided by a Steering Committee and a Stakeholders Group.
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