Hello Chairperson Lewis George, councilmembers, and staff of the Committee on Facilities. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today by providing testimony regarding the performance of the Department of Parks and Recreation. My name is Rachel Metz, and I am the Research and Data Manager at DC Action. DC Action uses research, data, coalition building, advocacy, and a racial equity lens to break down barriers that stand in the way of all kids reaching their full potential. We are also the home of DC KIDS COUNT, an online resource that tracks key indicators of child and youth well-being.
The Department of Parks and Recreation plays a major role in the District’s complex landscape of afterschool and summer programs, collectively known as out-of-school-time or OST programs. Included in my written testimony is our policy snapshot about the OST landscape to help understand DPR’s place in it. Thank you for your support of OST investments and for co-introducing the Universal Out-of-School-Time Amendment Act last month as well as last session. Youth who participate in high-quality OST programs demonstrate better classroom participation and school attendance, as well as learning new skills or topics, developing emotional maturity, and expanding creative or artistic skills. Furthermore, in DC, 2pm to 6pm is the peak time for youth-involved crime on school days–-47% of all youth-involved crimes occur during this window. OST programs can help keep young people from being both victims and perpetrators of crimes. In a survey of DC parents, 90% agreed that afterschool programs provide working parents with peace of mind knowing their children are safe and productively engaged while they work. 84% of parents agreed that afterschool programs help them keep their jobs. We’re so glad that, with your support, families can envision a District where all young people have access to safe, engaging activities during out-of-school time.
To know what progress we’re making towards the goal of universal access to OST opportunities, though, we need much more transparency about current capacity at DPR. Specifically:
- Concrete deduplicated seat counts
For many years, when asked how many OST seats they operate, DPR would provide a count that wasn’t deduplicated. This means if there were 4 weeklong sessions of a 100-camper camp, they counted it as 400 seats instead of 100 seats available at any given moment during the summer. As a result, the best DPR numbers are from the DC Policy Center needs assessment because DC Policy Center was able to parse through DPR’s administrative data to manually deduplicate the seat count. They found that, in the 2021-22 school year, DPR provided 1,742 afterschool seats, 2,727 summer seats, and 8,096 for seasonal sports or seasonal breaks. When asked during last year’s oversight season how those numbers changed after a $3 million influx of additional funding in fiscal year 2023, DPR shared that “between Summer 2022 and Summer 2023, the number of families and individual children served and enrolled in camp increased” and that the “number of families receiving reduced rate discounts on program registration grew by 184%, dramatically expanding the number of families receiving discounts.” That’s clearly progress! Unfortunately we don’t know if the increases refer to duplicated or unduplicated counts, nor what the actual number of seats were, making it hard to know how much progress we’ve made in moving towards enough seats for the demand.
- Greater budget transparency
Speaking of not knowing how much progress we’ve actually made, for many years the budget book broke out lines for out of school time initiatives operated by DPR (in FY24 OST was listed separately from seasonal camps, community center, and aquatic programs, for example). The FY25 budget book groups all “site-based” programs together, making it hard to clearly understand OST related seat capacity, funding levels for various DPR services, and changes in programming priorities and funding availability year-over-year.
- Clear status update on a unified OST enrollment database
DPR has done great work to create a modern, online program registration system. Our understanding is that DPR is coordinating with Learn24 and other agencies providing OST programs to create a unified OST program-finding and enrollment database. We are excited about the promise of that new system, as it represents a step forward for families in streamlining the often chaotic OST enrollment process. Unified database sharing information across agencies can also allow for automated reporting on deduplicated OST seat counts and deduplicated youth enrollment counts. In other words, if a child enrolled in a Learn24-funded camp in June, a DPR camp in July, and a new-student academy funded by their charter in August, the District’s OST ecosystem is still serving one child, not three. We urge this committee to ask DPR about the status of their program enrollment system, how they are working to connect their system data with a larger OST database, and if the unified system is being set up to allow for that type of analysis. This would support the OST Commission and the Council in reaching the goal of achieving universal OST.
- Build up from DPR’s new data foundation
A unified OST enrollment database should mean that information gathered across different agencies can be linked to a students’ education data, including grade level, attendance, discipline record, graduation rate, etc. This unlocks a world of options to gain a better understanding of the impact of different OST programs. OST programs range from academically focused afterschool tutoring at schools to summer sports camps to art programs and so much more. Much of the research on OST has focused on just the first type, however, which has led to a push by some policymakers to fund those programs simply because that’s what there’s a research base to back. We have argued that students benefit from programs that allow them to explore a range of interests so they can find their passions, which in turn makes them more likely to engage with school. Certainly parents paying privately for afterschool or summer programs want that opportunity for their children, and publicly-funded programs should afford the same range of options. The unified OST database, if linked to OSSE data such as the Statewide Longitudinal Education Data System, could allow us to actually test that reasoning. We could look at whether enrollment in art or music programs, for example, impacts school attendance in a different way than tutoring programs, or whether participating in middle school OST opportunities impacts high school graduation rates. This is an exciting opportunity for the District to make more data-informed decisions in shaping the OST landscape moving forward.
We truly appreciate the work DPR has done to move from a chaotic system of paper registration forms to a modern online registration system. We hope that you will encourage them to build on that infrastructure and improve transparency as a needed anchor partner to achieve the District’s goal of universal out-of-school-time access for all youth inclusive of their race, language, family income, where they live, where they go to school, or their special needs. Thank you.