SEARCH FOR RESOURCES
This journal article documents one OST director’s journey through the process of becoming credentialed. It explores fears and challenges and what she—and her program participants, families, and staff—ultimately gained from the process. This story can bring a personal experience to life for state system planners creating or supporting a school-age credential.
This article explores the challenges and potential of school-afterschool partnerships. Based on interviews with school administrators, afterschool leaders, and front-line staff in three schools, the findings reveal both disconnections and opportunities for fuller communication and collaboration. This article would be helpful to OST system builders as well as practitioners/programs looking to enhance their relationships with schools.
This issue brief explores how strategies for increased support for expanded learning programs can help reduce the disparities in educational outcomes between student populations. It provides examples from California's efforts to use local funding to enable more lower-income students have access to enrichment opportunities in out-of-school time. Strategies include increased funding for continuous improvement, more professional development, and increased coordination between out-of-school time and the school day by increasing the number of staff who work across both settings. This resource supports resiliency.
This video on social-emotional learning (SEL) examines core capabilities known as executive function and self-regulation skills. It explores what these skills are, why they are important, how they develop, and how they are negatively affected by stress for children, adolescents, and adult caregivers. This resource supports resilience.
This journal article describes the Center for Study of Social Policy's Youth Thrive Framework that is based on how the research on resilience, positive youth development, neuroscience, and trauma can help lead to healthy development and well-being for youth. There are multiple examples of how the Framework can be used to modify frontline practice, policy, and organizational culture. The examples rely on strong relationships and strategies based on neuroscience to alleviate the effects of trauma and especially to guide youth in foster care. This resource supports resilience.
This national study explores how low-income children's access to early childhood education might differ from their higher-income peers and how child care subsidy policies can close the gap. The study assigned states to one of five profiles based on a package of subsidy policies to produce findings about which packages provide equity in access to high quality programs.
This brief identifies evidence-based prevention tools that are low-cost targeted strategies for SEL. These "kernels" of practice are easy to implement and helpful for afterschool and summer programs that would be challenged to bring a full SEL curriculum to scale due to time or financial constraints. For example, to promote emotional self-regulation, staff can help children learn deep breathing, positive self-talk, yoga, and exercises. This resource supports resilience.
This video introduces a framework for a more collaborative and effective evaluation approach for Tribal child welfare programs. This approach modifies the evaluation process from what can feel like externally applied judgement from the dominant culture to one that taps the knowledge of non-dominant cultures. This approach incorporates best practices in continuous quality improvement to engage the community in meaningful program planning and improvement which could be applied to any program.
This issue brief offers an overview of risk factors and symptoms associated with opioid abuse and a list of interventions that can improve outcomes for children and teens affected by opioid exposure. Geared for parents, schools, and programs, each entry includes a description of the intervention, examples of associated actions, and quality indicators that can be expected when the intervention is implemented successfully.
This report by the Search Institute highlights the importance of healthy, supportive relationships to positive youth outcomes. It articulates the Search Institute’s Developmental Relationships Framework and includes sections on why developmental relationships matter; how developmental relationships grow; activating relationships in organizations; 55 ideas for deepening one-on-one relationships (for parents, teachers, and youth workers); and imagining strong and flexible webs of relationships. This resource supports resilience.