| Enrichment grant expires in August |
By: DAVID HENKE, Staff Writer
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Posted: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 11:45 pm
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NORTHFIELD — The Northfield Promise Fellows. The Middle School Youth Center. A high school tutoring program.
What do the three have in common? Each is a link in the PRIMEtime Collaborative, a network of nine organizations and youth programs that provide support for more than 1,000 Northfield students, and each is about to lose some, or all, of its funding.
The collaborative, funded entirely by a two-year, $300,000 grant from the Minnesota Department of Education, believed responsible for significant gains in student academic achievement and enrichment. But the original grant, earmarked specifically for after-school youth programming, will expire at the end of August, and the group has yet to find a suitable replacement.
“It’s not entirely bleak, but it’s not promising,” said Northfield Health Community Initiative Coordinator Zach Pruitt. The HCI, one of the organizations participating in the collaborative, stands to lose 7 percent of its total budget when the grant expires. Other programs, like the evening homework help sessions at Greenvale Park Elementary School, will lose 100 percent of their funding.
The collaborative, Pruitt said, is working to find additional resources to continue its youth programs, but in a poor economy the going isn’t easy. Even if they are able to continue all of programs currently funded under the grant, Pruitt and Northfield High School Assistant Principal Marnie Thompson said, the lack of resources will mean that those programs might have to cut staff, hours or impose an enrollment cap.
Cutting into the programs, Pruitt said, is worrisome, especially when the collaborative has had such a demonstrably positive effect on youth in Northfield.
In 2007-2008, the PRIMEtime Collaborative served 1,169 Northfield students at all grade levels. According to statistics compiled by the collaborative, 83.3 percent of those students showed improved academic scores on the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests. The average PRIMEtime student improved by 3.22 percentile points in math and 3.38 percentile points in language usage on the MAP exams, tests that represent the instructional level of each student and measure growth over time.
“We’ve always had these programs, but [the grant] has allowed us to create a unified, seamless K-12 after-school program,” Thompson said.
Currently, the collaborative is actively searching for alternative options for funding and exploring ways to make the youth programs more cost-efficient. Although the collaborative was aware from the start that the grant would expire in 2009, Pruitt said, they were optimistic that they would be able to receive additional state funding. When it became apparent that no further funding would be available, the collaborative turned to other options.
“Some very serious decisions will have to be made,” said Northfield Union of Youth director Josh Hinnenkamp, whose organization received more than $40,000 of grant money in the last year. “It’s going to mean staff, programs, transportation.”
The $150,000 provided by the grant over the 2008-09 school year is divided up between the programs involved in the PRIMEtime Collaborative. Here is a breakdown of the funding, and the percentage of each recipient’s total budget the grant money comprises.
Northfield Union of Youth: $42,475, 40 percent
Elementary School PLUS program: $23,568, 78 percent
Summer PLUS program: $31,542, 82 percent
Middle School Youth Center: $16,267, 42 percent
St. Olaf College Reaching Our Goals program transportation: $1,200, 100 percent
Greenvale Park Elementary Homework Help program: $2,400, 100 percent
High School Homework Help program: $900, 100 percent
Healthy Community Initiative: $14,689, 7 percent
Northfield Promise Fellows, $9,000, 50 percent
The grant also covers daily transportation from the program sites, snacks for youth participants, cultural- and gender-specific programming and evaluation efforts.
— David Henke can be reached at dhenke@northfieldnews.com or 645-1100.
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