Philadelphia Out of School Time Strategic Plan

Overview The City of Philadelphia’s Out of School Time (OST) is a multi-pronged system. The City of Philadelphia currently invests over $24 million each year (representing approximately 17,000 program slots, roughly 10,000 of them are summer slots and 7,000 area afterschool slots) across multiple City departments and DHS-funded non-profits to provide afterschool and summer time activities for children and youth. This is in addition to the non-profit and community-based programs, funded primarily by the Commonwealth (about a $10 million investment), to provide positive out of school opportunities for young people. However, these efforts are not always as aligned or as coordinated as they could be to ensure the greatest impact for the young people we seek to serve. In 2012 the City received a Wallace Foundation grant to help strengthen Philadelphia’s OST impact on youth by increasing and deepening the levels of coordination between and among the municipal agencies, schools, nonprofit youth programs and other institutions vital to providing these services. The grant supported efforts in two key areas: creating a structure to coordinate the city’s diverse afterschool programs and obtaining reliable information about them with the goal of improving quality, planning, policy development and evaluation.1 One result of this work was to move the local OST community toward linking program improvement and data collection to youth outcomes. The City’s Wallace team built a data management system, named PhillyBOOST, that for the first time asked city-funded and non-city funded providers to enter their enrollment and attendance data into one system. This foundation tied to the Kenny Administration’s focus on creating an equitable Philadelphia through youth-focused initiatives, performance-based budgeting, and his re-alignment of city government’s organizational structure has shaped this OST strategic plan. This document is intended to integrate Philadelphia’s OST community under a unifying vision and agenda that will help ensure a vibrant and thriving OST environment for youth in Philadelphia. The approach is intended to:  Focus the OST system’s efforts on an ambitious goal with clear targets and defined metrics to grow the system and improve its quality, using a defined age cohort and a place-based strategy;  Layer OST work with the broader initiatives of the Kenney Administration, such as Rebuild, Read by 4th, expanded Pre-Kindergarten, and Community Schools;  Build from the current OST efforts both internal and external to government, leveraging best practices and out of school time experts;  Involve community partners to expand our resources, in particular engaging community anchors and adults in OST.