One of the students, Samantha Alvarez, a fourth grader at PS 64 stood in a bright classroom mummifying apples as part of a science project.

“I’m like ok, can I just get over with day school and get to after school,” Alvarez, who is one of 60 students in the program, said. “I’m very hyper about it.”

PS 64 receives funding from both the city and the state, but this past year, the program lost its state funding from the 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC).and as a result, the program lost of 80 of its 120 students and 21 of its 30 staff members.

According to the New York State government web site, “For the 2008-09 school year, $10.00 million is recommended for programs to provide academic enrichment outside of the regular school hours primarily for children attending high-poverty and low-performing schools and schools identified as being in need of improvement.”

So, elementary schools like PS 64 that were not in need of improvement were not a high priority and in turn got their funding cut for the 2008-2009 school year.

Sarah Morgridge is the executive assistant to New York City council member, Robert Jackson, who is also the chair of the education committee.

While Jackson did not participate in the state-level negotiations, Morgridge did see the tensions the city council faced when forced to choose between cuts to the schools themselves and secondary education such as after-school programs.

“I mean neither of these are things that you want to cut, they both have profoundly negative consequences,” she said. “When you start cutting those programs, you are just unleashing a whole flood of bad things on the margin of society and that pulls every body down.”

The PS 64 program is run by the Educational Alliance, as well as the Boys and Girls Club.  The Educational Alliance has been a part of the Lower East Side community for 120 years, offering programs for everyone from kindergarten students to senior citizens.

Chino Okonkwo, a division director at the Educational Alliance, who runs the after-school programs; she knows the impact that a good after-school program can have not just on the students, but on a community as a whole.

“The community needs it, those working families don’t have places to send their children and if they do, it’s with someone within their family, like a grandparent,” Okonwo said. “Studies show that if students have access to highly enriched activities in the afterschool hours, it increases their self-esteem, it increases their motivation to come to school. So, a child being enrolled in a high quality afterschool program is really important to their development.”

A recent study done by the Coalition for After-School Funding showed that students that participate in these programs have higher standardized test scores, improved social skills and are less likely to be involved in violence and drugs.

Anju Rupchandani, the program director at PS 64, is still reeling from the effects of the budget cuts.

“For the budget cuts, we had to choose families on a first-come, first-serve basis,” Rupchandani said. “As opposed to allowing everybody to belong to our program, now we give preferences to working families instead of other families…it’s just very sad all of the budget cuts that we’ve had, we can’t offer the services that we used to.”

The afterschool program at PS 64 prides itself on being a big part of the community, they want to be able to focus not just on the children, but on their families as well. This year, due to the budget cuts, they were not able to provide a lot of the services they had hoped to implement.

“We were hoping to come into this new school year offering a lot of services to families, like GED programs, resume writing and career prep…those were some of the things that we scheduled ourselves to do and because of the budget cuts, we weren’t able to offer those services to families,” Rupchandani said. “We don’t believe in only servicing the child, we believe in servicing an entire family, we’re servicing the community, not just one person.”
Zenaida Watson is a group leader that works at the after-school program at PS 64, as well as a parent herself. She understands the program’s importance to students and parents alike.

“It benefits the kids a lot, because parents need a place for their kids to come to, “ she said. “I mean this is like a safe haven place, where they know their kids are safe instead of out on the streets or with a babysitter that their parents can’t afford.”

Watson heard firsthand from distressed parents after the budget cuts were announced. Many of the parents work full-time jobs and don’t have the money for a baby-sitter for their child, so without the after-school program, they have no other option for after-school care.

“You know, I have parents really depressed and stressed over it, about how they have no place to send their kids,” Watson said.  “When we had the budget cuts, we had parents crying like, where are we going to send our kids and you know it’s hard to explain that this is not our fault, this is what happened with the economy…it’s heartbreaking.”

The 60 children that can still participate in the program have different options every day. They can play basketball or tennis, work on their homework, create art projects, participate in cooking classes or take field trips all over the city.

One of the more unique elements of this particular afterschool program is the “Power Hour” that they offer. It is one hour designated every day for students to work one on one with a group leader on their homework. This benefits the students by allowing them to work through any questions they may have in specific subjects.

Homework is not something that most children would look forward to, but for Dylan Penalo, a fourth grader, it is something that really stands out about his time in the afterschool program.

“One of the things that I really like is doing my homework, because sometimes when I go home, sometimes I don’t understand my homework so …all the people in the afterschool help me with my homework,” Penalo said.

Penalo is not alone, many of the students in the program named homework help as one of the best parts of the program.  Michael Tirado, who is in the fifth grade, sometimes has a hard time finishing his homework at home and really benefits from the help he gets at the “Power Hour.”

“It’s like when I get home it’s harder for me to do my homework by myself, but when I come to afterschool, they actually help me do my homework so I get it done before I get home,” Tirado said.

Damika Islar, the program coordinator, sees the positive changes in the students and knows that the after-school program plays a large role in helping their development. Islar has been working for the program for almost five years, so she has seen children blossom over time at the program.

“It is really effective for them,” she said. “It gives them a positive outlook on things that they can still do, we give them a lot of room to grow in this program.”

While the benefits of after-school programs are widely known, the current state of the economy has forced the state of New York to make major budget cuts in every area.

The post Budget cuts hurt after-school programs appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Condoms and the lack of sex education in schools are at the center of the debate of HIV/AIDS education. Photo by Victoria Peckham

Every hour in the United States, two young adults between the ages of 13-24 contract HIV. In 2006, young adults between the ages of 13-29 accounted for 34% or 19,142 of new infections, which was the highest of any age group.

Those who work closely with America’s youth say this trend will continue, unless there is an evolution in the way we educate teens about sex. According to experts, there is a vast divide between what teens in the United States know about sex and what they need to know about protecting themselves. This gap is being blamed mostly on abstinence-only education and with $50 million of federal money budgeted for this type of education in 2008, as well as studies being released that attack the efficacy of these programs, activists are crying out for change.

Rana Barar, the Program Manager of Sex, etc, a website and magazine that is written and produced by teens and deals solely with issues of sexuality sees the lack of sex education in high schools as a tremendous hurdle to overcome in lowering the rates of HIV infection among young people.

“I think it’s tragic because teens are not getting the information they need to keep themselves safe and that’s irresponsible of us as adults to deprive them of that information,” Barar said.

With three federal funding programs dedicated to abstinence-only education, it has become the prevalent form of sex education in America’s high schools.

“I think that the culture in the last eight years has been really strongly centered around abstinence-only until marriage education and at best it presents flawed information and at worst it presents outright lies,” Barar said. “That does not help kids stay safe, that does not give them the skills to reduce their risk taking. Age appropriate comprehensive sexuality education has been shown to help teens reduce their risk.”

The main issue she sees with the abstinence-only education is that it provides no information about contraceptives of any kind except to stress their failure rate.

“If young people don’t think condoms are effective in preventing HIV, then they don’t think they have to use them and that’s a huge myth we have to dispel that has been created by the abstinence-only campaign,” Barar said. “It’s hard enough to get them to use them to begin with.”

The CDC reported that in 2007, 39% of currently sexually active high school students did not use a condom during their last sexual encounter. With research showing that the correct and consistent use of a condom can reduce the risk of STD transmission, including HIV infection and the number of infected teens showing no signs of decreasing, activists are desperately searching for ways to turn this trend around.

James Learned, the Director of Programs at the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP) launched a campaign in New York City led by youth called, “Find the Condoms in Your School.” The program encouraged teens to get involved and offered training to help teens become active in the fight for free condom access in their schools.

All high schools in New York City are required to provide free condoms to students and Learned wants to ensure that teens are aware of this. He feels that abstinence-only education can be detrimental to youth’s views on condom efficacy.

“When they talk about condoms, they say that they’re not effective or not very effective,” Learned said. “Abstinence-only education never teaches anyone about how to effectively use a condom, they have to be used and they have to be used properly.”

Even with the growing, strong opposition to abstinence-focused education, there are still organizations that think that the abstinence approach is effective, especially as a way to provide support for teens who do not want to become sexually active.

Richard Urban, the Director of Ultra Teen Choice in Washington DC, offers abstinence directive education through his foundation to youth in the area.  He maintains that youth from the ages of 12-18 should not be having sex and offers support for teens that want to abstain.

“We need a directive approach, we need to set a standard for our youth,” Urban said. “Why only have high expectations for academics, but when it comes to sexual activity, say well you’re going to have sex anyway, so just use condoms. That is not a really high expectation.”

Washington D.C., where Ultra Teen Choice is located, has the distinction of having the highest new infection rate in the country, there are 128.4 cases of HIV/AIDS per 100,000 people compared to the national average of 14 per 100,000. This does not discourage Urban, in fact, in an opinion piece published in the Washington Times, he expressed his dismay at being told to cease operations at all D.C. public schools. Urban maintains that 22 percent more high school youth in the city are abstaining from sex than 14 years ago and feels that it is negligent to completely disregard the teens that want to remain abstinent.

“More than 50% of teens are abstaining so why would you not want to support and encourage that?” Urban said.

While Urban asserts that abstinence-only education has its place in sex education, recent studies have found that it can actually deter contraceptive use among sexually active teens. Conversely, many studies have been released that show concrete evidence that comprehensive sex education programs that provide information about abstinence and contraception are effective in delaying sexual activity among teens and also reducing their number of partners.

At Philadelphia FIGHT, a comprehensive AIDS service organization, the Youth Health Empowerment Program (YHEP) strives to close the gap in the information that teens are receiving about sex. They want to ensure that youth are getting all of the information they need to protect themselves. YHEP was founded in 1994 to reduce sexually transmitted infections in Philadelphia and since then has evolved into a community organization that provides counseling services, empowerment coaches, free rapid HIV testing, prevention counselors and many other valuable resources to Philadelphia youth who desperately need them.

Robin Brennan, the Program Director at YHEP stresses the importance of complete sexual education and offering young people as many different options to educate themselves as possible.

“Overall education and taking the moral component out of it and talking about what can potentially prevent sexually transmitted infection in our youth overall is crucial,” Brennan said. “Our job is to make sure our children and our youth are informed and they have the option to at least make informed decisions.”

Sophavy Phuong started off with YHEP as a peer educator when she was a junior in high school, then moved into a role as a family planning counselor. Now at 22, she works at YHEP as an office manager.  She said that many of her friends do not have a lot of money and when they do have extra cash, would rather go see a movie than buy condoms. She said that because of YHEP and the access to free condoms that it provided, she has been able to help her peers stay safe.

“I was able to distribute condoms to my friends that urgently needed them,” she said.

Phuong said that before she came to YHEP  she knew nothing about the female reproductive organs and now she is responsible for helping to educate teens in her community.

Hearing stories like these from young adults like Phuong only strengthens Brennan’s sense of urgency to promote the importance of comprehensive sex education to youth. For Brennan, honest, straightforward information is the only way to slow the alarming rate of infection in America’s youth.

“I think a lot of times we talk about family values, moral values and it is killing our youth,” Brennan said. “With abstinence-only programs, we are robbing our youth of valuable information that can save their lives.”

The post Living With HIV/AIDS: Teens appeared first on Pavement Pieces.