Programs · How it works
The method, which is mostly consistency.
Eight kids to one adult. Eleven weeks. One project finished and shown to a stranger. Everything else is logistics.
- Ratio
- 1:8, hard cap
- Term
- 11 weeks
- Survey response
- 91%
- Return rate
- 78%
The four things that matter
- A real ratio. One adult for every eight kids, capped at fourteen per room. Not a district ratio, not an average across a building — the actual number in the actual room, every day.
- A long enough arc. Eleven weeks is long enough to get bad at something, quit internally, and come back. Two weeks is not. Most after-school programs are two weeks in a trench coat.
- A real audience. Every term ends with work shown to someone who is not a parent. A barber, an engineer, another class, the guy at the hardware store.
- The same adult. Kids get the same program lead all term. Substitutes are for emergencies, not scheduling convenience.
The term arc
| Weeks | Phase | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1–2 | Take it apart | Every program starts by dismantling something. A machine, a technique, an assumption. Kids learn the parts before they make a promise. |
| Weeks 3–6 | Skill blocks | Short, repeatable practice. Tinning a wire, wedging clay, measuring a span, sitting still for four minutes. |
| Weeks 7–9 | The build | One project, chosen by the kid within a theme, with a real constraint and a real deadline. |
| Week 10 | The critique | Kids present to each other first. Then to a guest — a barber, an engineer, a parent, another kid's class. |
| Week 11 | The show | Work goes on the wall, in the salon window, or on the auditorium stage. Then we take it down and start again. |
What a session feels like
Snack first, always. Then a five-minute check-in where every kid says one sentence. Then a skill block of 30–40 minutes, taught once and practiced immediately. Then the long middle: kids working on their own thing while staff move between benches. Then a hard stop for cleanup, which everyone does, including the director. Then pickup, which is chaos, and then the staff meeting, which is ten minutes and not an hour.
How we know it worked
Three measures, published every year in the impact report:
The survey is twelve questions kids fill out twice a year, on paper, with a staff member who is not their program lead. The questions are not 'did you enjoy it.' They are things like 'I can keep going when something is hard' and 'I can explain what I made to someone else.' We publish the full question set and the year-over-year numbers, including the two questions where our scores are flat.
What we do not measure
- Test scores. We do not have access to them and would not use them.
- Grades. Same.
- Attendance as a compliance metric. We track it because it tells us if a kid is okay, not to scold anyone.
- College enrollment of alumni. We know where some of them went. It is not a KPI and treating it like one would turn this into a different program.
Every after-school program says 'hands-on learning.' The difference is what happens in week eight, when the project is not working and the kid wants to quit. That is the moment the program either exists or does not.
Pick two. Stay eleven weeks. Show somebody.
Every program runs one afternoon a week for a full term. Kids choose two, and we do not shuffle them around like a tasting menu.