BengalNews Reporters
During after-school hours children can become curious and restless. Or in some cases get into trouble on city streets.
Buffalo Public Schools such as School 3, on Niagara Street, and School 30, on Vermont and 13 St. have implemented after school programs in order to occupy students’ time during crucial hours that students may be exposed to drugs, weapons and violence.
“We have two programs that begin with academics,” Dr. Wanda Shoenfeld principal of School 30 said. “The first hour we emphasize on reading and math and the second hour the students are involved with music, physical education, art, cooking, arts and craft, tutoring, cheer leading, swimming, basketball, and computers, just to name a few.”
While the schools are implementing these programs there is still a need outside the system.
Evelyn Pizarro, former principal of School 3, is now the project director at The Belle Center Community Center on 104 Maryland St.
Pizarro said that The Belle Center upholds a gentlemen’s agreement with neighborhood drug dealers in order to maintain civility. They stay away from the children and she doesn’t call them in.
This shows how real the danger is to the children in the community. Without afterschool programs offering activities for children to take part in, they could very well get caught up in the illegal behavior that happens daily on the streets.
Evelyn Pizarro says it's hard to get kids to come regularly:
The center welcomes children and splits them up into various age groups so the program can benefit them in the best way possible. While it gives students a place to do homework and enjoy numerous activities it operates under the 21ST Century Grant, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, which provides opportunities for children to participate in activities during non-school hours.
“If you get the same crop of kids coming at least three times a week that’s a good program, if you get an average of some kids that come maybe six times a month that’s still considered good, “said Pizarro.
When the children come to the center they have a minimum of 45 minutes of homework they have to complete. Supervisors at the Center also have teacher’s e-mail addresses so they can keep track of the work the students need to catch up on.
Once the students’ work is done they can take part in activities in the gym and game room. There is also a pool that is being fixed, and they hope to have it working by the summer.
These after-school programs from both facilities are also benefiting the community. Shoenfeld said they have just completed a program called Urban Studies where students were involved with looking closer at their neighborhood and planning to make it better.
At The Belle Center the children work with AmeriCorps, a national non-profit organization, Children are able to be more involved in the neighborhood by shoveling porches in the winter and painting houses among other things.
“My kids are going to be involved on Global Youth Day on April 24, and there is going to be activities all over the city like cleaning gardens and cleaning up graffiti,” said Pizarro. “We can choose one of the activities that AmeriCorps is doing and our group will go with their group and do those.”
The influence of good role models and the opportunity to attend afterschool programs is something Pizarro and Shoenfeld said is an essential part of the success of the programs.
“I believe that with an after-school program we keep students off the street and they feel a part of something bigger,” Shoenfeld said. “We, the teachers have an opportunity to extent the academic learning and practice differently than what takes place during the regular school day.”
Police league provides programs
Assisting in the effort to keep children off the streets in Buffalo is the Buffalo Police Athletic League with a variety of safe, fun activities to keep them entertained and out of trouble.
The Buffalo Police Athletic League provides a example of what can be done when people take a vested interest in helping kids become better individuals. PAL’s mission is to teach kids life skills, leadership, and direction by providing them with organized activities in a safe comfortable environment.
PAL provides a wide array of athletic programs including basketball leagues, a baseball league, ice skating, tennis, golf, floor hockey, and even a boxing program. PAL also provides other educational opportunities to the children at the seven community centers of the PAL program are: Asarese-Matters, Machnisa, Hennepin, Lincoln, Tosh Collins, Lanigan, and JFK.
The Buffalo Police Athletic League serves around 40,000 children in the Buffalo-Niagara area and is funded through grants from the City of Buffalo, Erie County, New York State, and other private and public donations.
Juvenile crime and violence in schools have decreased. According to the National Statistics of Youth Violence Project, “violent crime in schools has declined dramatically since 1994. The annual rate of serious violent crime in 2007 (40 per 1,000 students) was less than half of the rate in 1994.” The data gathered for the national statistics, are “victim reports collected as part of the National Crime Victimization Survey and are not derived from school records.”
ReplyDeleteThere are some frightening statistics that jump out, after a breakdown of the various crimes that take place in public schools.
The most common types of offenses committed in schools are physical attacks without weapons, theft, and vandalism with about 45 percent of schools reporting these types of crimes to the authorities.
Bullying in schools is a very common offense among elementary school students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “of those who were bullied, a subgroup also reported being physically injured (bruise, cut, bloody nose, etc.) by the bullying.”
There are on average 2.7 million total crimes in schools across the United States every year, according to the Justice Department, with about one in five students reporting being threatened with violence at one point or another. On average there are a 133,700 violent crimes being committed against teachers at school and 217,400 thefts from teachers.
A statistic that really jumps out at you though, is the fact that only 9 percent of violent crimes committed against teenagers that occurred in school were reported to the authorities as compared to 37 percent of those types of crimes committed on the street being reported to police.
While school violence is not as high as it has been in the past there is still a long way to go towards making schools a safer, more comfortable place for students.
--Marc Lucarelli
When you were in school you always knew who the delinquent children were, right? They were the children who skipped classes, got caught smoking, started drinking at a young age and never got involved in extra curricular activities.
ReplyDeleteTeachers always seemed to know in advance who these children were before they even had them in class, and always had their eye on them. That attention though may very well be part of the problem. Jacqueline Ercole from the University of Connecticut said in her study on Labeling in the classroom “it is possible that teachers may play an even larger role in undermining these students’ functioning, specifically through labeling.”
Like the age-old question was it the chicken or the egg? Is it a deviant child that comes first, or the deviant label thus causing a deviant child? If we stop expecting trouble in advance does that change the way they act? Maybe we need to find a different way to deal with “bad” students instead of giving them the negative attention they so badly crave when they act out.
What if children are required to take place in a program after school of their choosing? Giving them a place to belong depending on their interests could be a way to stop them from acting out.
Once involved in an activity, students now have something to lose. If they act out or their grades drop they may not be able to participate. Maybe working toward something would help keep students on track. --Tiffany Monde