We are overjoyed to celebrate 10 years of the CASE Afterschool Program. What began in one classroom with just a handful of middle school students has now expanded to four MNPS schools, serving over 140 youth a year. Our focus, however, has never just been on the expansion of numbers, but rather ensuring the quality of our programming, the quality of our staff, and ultimately, ensuring the changed lives of the youth we serve. In this article, we hope to not only note our milestones and achievements over the past decade, but to tell the story of our program and highlight the young people we have been privileged to serve.
In 2014, NAZA (Nashville After Zone Alliance) contacted our organization, having heard of the ways we were already serving our local community and noting the need for additional afterschool programming sites in our area. They shared with us the compelling statistics that only 10% of 20,000 MNPS middle school students participate in structured afterschool programming. In addition, youth crime and child victimization most occurs between the hours of 3 & 7pm, typically the time between when school dismisses and when most working parents return home. We were eager to help address this gap and formalize our afterschool efforts to begin “CASE: Character and Skills Education.”
Our name highlights some of the pillars of who we are and what we provide: Character and Skills. We set out to create a place in which students had the opportunity to grow in life skills that will not only help them now, but also into the future. We did this by partnering with local businesses and organizations to expose youth to various skills including cooking, gardening, debate, construction, entrepreneurialism, acting, sports, financial literacy and so much more! We wanted kids to have new experiences that they might not have access to during a normal school day. Our goal was to provide experiences that would inspire kids to learn more about who they are and what passions they may want to pursue into their future.
In our pursuit of offering unique experiences and skill-based lessons to youth, we have partnered with many businesses and organizations in the Nashville area. Youth have done everything from learning how to make candles with local small business, Light Shine Candles to making their own electric circuits with MCH Nashville. They have learned new instruments with YEAH Rocks and participated in youth-led initiatives with Youth In Action and even published their own book with the help of Carnegie Writers Our youth have attended some incredible field trips to the Lost River Cave, the Frist Art Museum, the Muhammad Ali Center, TPAC, NMAAM, the Nashville Zoo, and the Nissan Factory - just to list a few!
We strongly believe in developing the leadership capacity of youth. To better serve the youth in our community, we structured our program to intentionally center their voices, acknowledging their decision-making authority, empowering them to lead and generate solutions. We provide multiple youth-led events and opportunities each year. Our end-of-the-year ShowCASE is a youth and parent favorite. Youth work together to plan everything about the event from invitations and food to decorations and performances.These events are always well-attended by the community and have even had special guests like former Congressman Jim Cooper present.
Another aspect of our name “Character” has affected all aspects of our curriculum and programming. We recognized that it was not just about what activities we offered to youth but about the way they were taught and the lessons learned along the way. We set out to not only teach kids how to cook in a cooking competition, but also how to have responsibility with tools, how to interact with their teammates to complete a project together, and how to communicate their creation with confidence. We recognized that teaching youth about good character had the ability to shape kids into kinder, more empathetic, confident, healthy, and productive members of society.
In the last few years, our program collaborated with NAZA to support the rollout of Nashville’s Vision for Holistic Youth Development, a framework for effective youth development created by 200+ stakeholders and 25+ organizations. The framework emphasizes the development of mindsets, social and emotional skills, and cognitive skills that will help youth thrive. Staff from our program contributed their expertise and experience to help develop ways of communicating the vision to other organizations and stakeholders, helping NAZA implement the vision and extending the impact of this great effort. By sharing our knowledge, we helped both organizations enhance their impact on the lives of youth.
Another pillar of who we are is our focus on mentorship in our programs. According to John Hopkins researcher Dr. Robert Balfanz, in high-poverty schools, if a sixth grade child attends less than 80 percent of the time, receives an unsatisfactory behavior grade in a core course, or fails math or English, there is a 75 percent chance that they will later dropout of high school — absent effective intervention. What is effective intervention? According to Balfanz, it’s “an adult counter force, they need another adult or several adults in the students’ lives who every day is reminding them in simple ways that schooling leads to a good future and you could succeed in school.”
We have taken statistics like this seriously, recognizing that our staff and volunteers have the opportunity every day to be that positive counterforce in a child’s life, to be the one who reminds them that they are seen, that they have potential, and to never give up. Providing youth with healthy, caring adults in their life who believe in them is at the core of what we do.
One former student, now in high school, contacted a CASE staff member to thank him. She said, “I was thinking about CASE the other day and it made me want to reach out. You helped me with my ADD and I’m able to focus better in high school (which by the way is really hard). But I’ve been able to keep all A’s and B’s. I also pursued art and have won a few competitions.” This testimony may seem small, but if you’ve ever been on the other side of receiving the help and care of a mentor, then you know, it’s huge.
Middle school is a pivotal time where students decide what kind of people they are going to be and how they are going to respond to their circumstances. We often witness the contrast between bubbly, spirited 5th graders and the hardened, melancholy eighth graders. Though kids are resilient, there’s a shift in them as they get older. They stop trusting people as easily and begin feeling more anxious about the future. At CASE, our goal is to give them positive experiences that enrich them both in their academics and their relationships with their peers, teachers, and families.
We would like to extend a huge thank you to NAZA (Nashville After Zone Alliance) for their incredible support of our program that has included not only the financial support needed, but professional development, evaluation services, technical support, and ongoing collaboration to provide the best programs to our youth. NAZA’s dedication and commitment to providing youth with equitable access to afterschool program is commendable and we are forever indebted to them.
We thank each of our dedicated staff without whom, our program simply would not and could not exist to the quality that it does. Thank you for the countless hours invested into Nashville’s youth. We can think of no cause more worthy than the investment into our community’s youth, who we truly believe are the future. Here’s to the next ten years!
See below for a timeline of our decade serving afterschool youth in the Nashville area.
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