For working families, the end of the school day does not necessarily line up with the end of the workday.
That challenge can be especially clear in communities with four-day school weeks, where families may also need a place for kids to go on Fridays. Colorado has one of the highest proportions of four-day weeks in the nation, with 60% of school districts adhering to that schedule. Most of those schools are in rural areas.
In Mancos, the School Community Youth Collaborative, or SCYC, operates free before- and after-school programming through a federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant, also known as 21st CCLC.
SCYC Executive Director Christine Brice said the organization provides programs for students from kindergarten through 12th grade, along with some Friday activities and field trips.
The greatest childcare need tends to be among younger students.
“Obviously, there’s a bigger need in that K-through-fifth-grade range, because it’s more of a childcare need for parents,” Brice said.
Because the program is funded through the 21st CCLC program, activities also include an academic component.
For younger students, that can include homework help. Older students can receive regular tutoring in core subjects when needed.
SCYC's services outside of academics run like clubs based on shared interests. Activities offered in Mancos have included running, dance, coding, esports and an imagination workshop. One student approached the program last year about creating a Warhammer tabletop gaming club and helped find other students to play along and an adult willing to lead it.
Brice said the mix of activities depends on both what students want and the knowledge base of their instructors.
The school is on a single campus, with SCYC providing services on-site - minimizing transportation concerns.
Students first have a short period SCYC calls the “Chill Zone,” followed by a snack before breaking into clubs and other activities.
Students can also drop in rather than committing to attend every day.
The program is technically open to home-school students and students from other districts as well, although Brice said transportation can make that difficult.
Last school year, SCYC served 886 individual students between its Mancos programs and its program at Montezuma-Cortez Middle School. Of those, 353 were served in Mancos.
Brice said SCYC is approaching its sixth year of operating the Mancos program.
But removing the cost of care does not eliminate every barrier for rural families.
SCYC currently cannot provide transportation home after its Mancos programs end at 5:30 p.m.
“We’re definitely up against funding challenges,” Brice said. “We do have a 21st Century grant, which funds most of it, but we often have to look other places for funding to kind of supplement that grant.”
She said the Mancos School District covers a large enough area that providing a second round of bus routes after programming would be difficult.
“I think their bus drivers would literally run a route, come back, and then run that same route again,” Brice said.
That means parents or other caregivers must arrange pickup at the end of the program.
By comparison, SCYC does provide transportation home from its program at Montezuma-Cortez Middle School.
Staffing is another potential limit.
Brice said SCYC employs about 50 program instructors across its programs. Many are teachers, while others are members from the community outside of the school system.
As some longtime instructors step away, the organization has to recruit replacements. Brice said finding substitutes when regular staff members were absent was particularly challenging last year.
That could become more significant if participation continues to grow.
SCYC does not currently have a waitlist in Mancos, but Brice said the organization has begun considering what would happen if more students attend than available staff can safely supervise.
“We want to serve as many kids as want to come,” she said. “But we also need to keep them safe. We need to keep them fed, and we want to make sure all their needs are met when they’re in our programs.”
SCYC is required to track measures including attendance, academic performance, social and emotional skills and family engagement as part of their fulfillment of the 21st CCLC grant. Brice said that means programming has to incorporate both academic support and opportunities for students to develop other skills outside the classroom.
For now, she said the more immediate challenges are practical ones already familiar to rural communities: maintaining funding, finding enough staff and making sure students have a way to get home when the program ends.
