Greetings central Texas Out-of-School Time program leaders!  The Central Texas Afterschool Network (CTAN) is gearing up to implement the CTAN BOOST Initiative for the 2015-16 school year, which aims to “boost” the capacity of out-of-school-time programs to grow and incorporate best practices for children’s physical activity, healthy eating, and social & emotional learning (SEL).  The CTAN BOOST Initiative, funded by a community health grant from St. David’s Foundation, is being led by a child health subcommittee of CTAN (chair: Angel Toscano) in partnership with the University of Texas School of Public Health-Austin.   CTAN BOOST activities for the 2015-16 school year will include 2-3 participatory action planning workshops in fall 2015 in which 10 OST program sites from across Central Texas will co-learn about best practices for child health promotion and develop a site-specific action plan for ‘boosting’ their OST program.

We have identified several OST program sites who have expressed initial interest (thank you awesome CTAN partners!). We are now looking for 10 additional elementary school OST sites that can serve as a comparison group/delayed action group for this coming year.  Comparison group sites will receive similar support as the first cohort of action planning OST sites at the end of the 2015-16 school year, which will include approximately $450 in supplies or monetary support, menu of best practices for boosting your healthy OST site, as well as the opportunity to participate in a co-learning action planning workshop around child health promotion in late spring 2016.  Both our first action planning cohort sites and the comparison sites will participate in evaluation activities during the 2015-16 school year that will include: a brief interview with the OST site coordinator and a noninvasive site observation visit to learn about current practices related to these topic areas, a child pedometer assessment to assess activity levels during the OST program, and a child survey for 3rd-5th grade students to learn more about physical activity, healthy eating, and SEL.  The evaluation is intended to help us learn about ways in which OST programs can support child health; no names of sites or staff will be included in the final write up of the initiative.

If your OST program site is interested in participating- or if you have more questions about the initiative, please email: Lauren Toppenberg, Project Coordinator, at: [email protected].  Thanks for all you do for healthy child development in central Texas!