For the last six months, PAER has conducted research and interviews in order to create a comprehensive report on learning in afterschool settings. Noam says the goal is to develop a “research and training agenda to improve quality learning opportunities in afterschool settings.”

Noam says Harvard has worked to determine community needs through interviews with afterschool providers in Harvard’s host communities.

“We want to really engage the community,” Noam says. “We don’t just want to drop things on them.”

Meanwhile, an interfaculty group, titled “Youth Development and Afterschool Time,” co-sponsored by PAER and the Harvard Children’s Initiative, is working to bring afterschool studies into the accepted realm of academic learning by engaging in active afterschool research.

Beyond research, Harvard has sent its own students into established afterschool programs as part of their academic work.

Students from Noam’s course “The Afterschool Child: Development, Urban Programs and Policy” volunteer once a week in programs throughout Boston. Several of Noam’s students who took the course last spring now have jobs as afterschool coordinators and in policy positions related to out-of-school time.

“This is proving a very successful way to provide afterschool programs with supervised students and training sites for future leaders in the growing afterschool field,” Noam says.

In addition, students at the Graduate School of Education are serving as consultants to programs in Boston for curriculum development, training issues and organizational structure, in addition to consulting with Phillips Brooks House afterschool providers at Harvard.

And beginning in January, PAER will present a series of integrated training workshops in collaboration with psychiatrists and clinical psychologists at McLean Hospital and Mass. General Hospital. The workshops, which will run through the summer, will deal with issues ranging from how to access the mental health system to working with depressed children in an afterschool setting.

Noam says these workshops will address problems that afterschool providers may not have training for, such as behavior management.

“We’ve talked to programs, and they have said this is a problem for them,” Noam says.

Taking The Lead

While Harvard has advanced its own afterschool goals—the overall partnership, which includes the city of Boston, United Way of Massachusetts Bay, Liberty Mutual, Verizon and FleetBoston Financial—has been moving slowly.

Christopher F.O. Gabrieli ’81, chair of the Afterschool For All Partnership, says the overall progress is “about three months behind” what he expected, with formal grant announcements not planned until the spring.

But he says the slow development is due to the first-time nature of the public-private partnership.