Last Day Party!

Yesterday was the last day of our community center’s (Monroe Circle Community Center) after-school program and it was a party! Amy Kring did an outstanding job and the kids had a great time. We ate, we played and every kid was able to pick two books to add to their home library. We learned a lot this first go around. With any new ministry I think it is plan, prep, launch, evaluate, adjust, adjust, adjust.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the moment we tend to forget how far we have come – this can be said about SonCity After-School. When we first launched there were so few kids you could hear the crickets, then they arrived and you could not hear yourself think and now we can see great progress in many of the kids.

At first we wanted to “touch” all 90+ kids living within this community at least once a week with SonCity After-School. What we quickly learned is that there are early adopters (people who pioneer) in every age group – 5, 25 and 55. These are the kids that wanted to stay the entire day and wanted to come back every day. So we adjusted and began to pour into 25 kids lives day after day. Pretty soon, they began to bring their friends.

Over and over, I could hear Ms. Amy telling the kids “what do we do? – we have a snack, we go upstairs and read, we come back down and do our homework, then we can color and play.”

Almost everyone of these kids are required to attend summer school for remediation – many of them are already 1 to 1 ½ years behind many of their classmates. Next year, we have a BHAG to have half of these kids on grade level so that they can play and attend summer camp instead of summer school.