Other issues and notes
There are a variety of issues that have been identified as contributing to the challenges that Medford is having in establishing after school care. While other cities and towns have been able to establish effective and equitable after school programs Medford has not been able to do so.
The following challenges and constraints also exist:
- Lack of clarity related to a shared vision across parents, city leaders, and school leaders
- No accountability on who should create a roadmap to solve this problem for Medford
- Lack of transparency for Medford families (defining scope of the problem, Definition of success, roadmap to solution)
- General public office constraints (budget, staffing, competing priorities)
- New locations outside MPS elementary buildings requires busing kids from school to new locations
- Distributing additional seats equitably while also recognizing greatest needs (youngest children, single parent families, two working parent families, income threshold)
Other Notes
- Budget: MPS afterschool programming is entirely self funded and in addition additional funds from tuition is a pool and an account to fund other MPS programming
- Public records requests: at least two separate public records request have been submitted in an attempt to get transparency about the wait lists and capacity; The latest request was disappointing because it was highly unresponsive and failed to meet the requirements of the Public Records Law; what it did reveal was that current enrollment is at pre-pandemic levels even though many who ran for the last election used adding additional seats as an achievement to their record
- We conducted a Survey of Medford Parents; the results are stark and confirm many Medford families are underemployed as a result of this crisis which leads to systemic economic hardship
