Last week, KidsTek Program Specialists Danielle BeDillon and Keysla Sano attended a professional development training called “Quality 101” given by the Denver Afterschool Alliance. The Denver Afterschool Alliance is a collaborative made up of the Denver Public Schools, the City and County of Denver, community organizations and funders.
The Alliance’s mission is to improve after school program quality and increase Denver’s youth attendance in these programs. This past fall, the Alliance released “Quality Pillars,” a guideline focused on regular program improvement efforts. As described by the Alliance: “These six pillars help an organization frame and focus its continuous program improvement efforts on locally and nationally adopted practices, and procedures proven to support the consistent delivery of high quality programs.”
The training was led by the Director of Extended Learning for Denver Public Schools, Katherine Plog Martinez, who stated that the pillars “are designed to help support providers in getting a foundation on knowledge of what program quality looks like, and then helping them think about how to take it back and dig in deeply to implement this at their sites and help make programs better for all the kids that we serve across Denver.”
Programs are encouraged to adopt the quality pillars framework and reference resources made available by the Denver Afterschool Alliance to help programs progress. KidsTek managers regularly attend professional development opportunities such as this in order to continue to provide high-quality programs to our students.
