The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

DAYTON – What’s the best way to keep kids out of trouble after school? Give them safe, healthy activities to enjoy, says Dayton’s interim Secondary Principal Kate Wenzl. Members of Columbia Cares, the Coalition for Youth and Families, Columbia County Public Health and county commissioners agree.

“The amount we have to pay for juvenile incarceration goes down when we have an afterschool program,” said Columbia County Commissioner Dwight Robanske. The county budgeted $70,000 for juvenile detention costs this year; in years prior that budget was significantly lower, closer to $40,000, when the school had an afterschool program and an AmeriCorps student advocate in the high school, he said.

A number of interest groups in the Dayton School District are looking into starting up an afterschool program again. Dayton had an afterschool program for several years, funded by the 21st Century Grant, but the program ended when the grant ended a few years ago. “That program was great,” said Superintendent Doug Johnson. “We had 70 kids coming at one point. But it was $75,000 to $80,000 to keep it running. We couldn’t fund it once the grant ran out.”

Public Health Director Martha Lanman spoke to county commissioners about the idea last week. Her department is searching for any grants that might help fund the program. “We estimate it will cost $15,000 for food (healthy snacks and drinks) alone,” Lanman told commissioners. Lanman is hopeful that a USDA grant might help cover food costs but won’t know more until she applies.

“We really think this will help keep our kids busy and build our sports programs,” Wenzl told community leaders at last week’s Coalition of Youth and Families meeting. Wenzl envisions the program as open to students K-12, with the older teens taking on leadership roles as mentors for younger students working on homework or learning new sports.

“Kids today are simply not active, and we need to keep them active,” she said. “Our sports programs are suffering because of it.” She has also spoken with county commissioners about bringing a school resource officer into the high school as well as locating an AmeriCorps worker to be the student advocate as Clay Lindsey, AmeriCorps volunteer and son of local teachers John and Dinah Lindsey, had been in the past.

Johnson says he supports the idea of reviving the Dayton afterschool program but cautions that it will be a much more scaled-down version of what the district was able to offer before. “And we don’t know how many kids will be interested,” he said. “Many of our students live outside of town, and there’s no way we could run all of our bus routes and then another one an hour later.”

“We can probably do this, but only if we get grants,” Johnson said. “And the staffing will be very different – lots of volunteers and high schoolers, who now have community services requirements, helping to run the program.”

The district may be able to use federal Title 1 money and state Learning Achievement Program (LAP) funding designed to help students who are behind catch up with their peers, he said. “But each grant we accept comes with certain guidelines, and then we have to design the program to meet those guidelines,” he said.

“The long and short of it is, we’re interested in continuing to see if we could put this together, but right now we’re still trying to figure out what it would look like, whether we have kids who would like to participate, and how we will fund it,” Johnson said. “In the junior high, we already have an academic support program to help student get their homework done. Some kids, despite that they have 45 minutes a day at school to do their homework, still don’t get it done. Basically, if we don’t make it relevant to the kids, they won’t want to go.”