Pennsylvania Older Youth Out-of-School Time Study

Posted by on October 24, 2010

PSAYDN is excited to share The Pennsylvania Older Youth Out-of-School Time Study: A Practitioner’s Guide to Promising Practices for Recruiting and Retaining Older Youth that contains rarely studied data on programs for Pennsylvania’s older youth.

Did You Know?
• Programs with the highest recruitment and retention (RRT) offer career skills, internships and/or workforce development.
• High-RRT programs hire staff with a college degree.
• Programs that hire older youth to work at the program are more likely to be full early in the program year than programs that do not hire youth.
• Programs that provide older youth with their own space and case management to link youth to other services were more likely to be full later in the program year.

The Practitioner’s Guide also includes an integrated literature review, steps to develop a recruitment and retention plan and additional resources. Click here for more information and to download the Practitioner’s Guide.

http://www.psaydn.org/Documents/2010PractitionerGuideforOlderYouthRetention.pdf

The Practitioner’s Guide was written in collaboration with researchers at Penn State University and the Center for Schools and Communities, in response to the 2009 Pennsylvania Legislative Budget and Finance Committee report that assessed the unmet need of afterschool programs in Pennsylvania and the difficulty in assessing programs for older youth. Over 135 out-of-school time programs from across the state participated in the study.