For the past four years, Dalton Public Schools and City of Refuge have partnered on summer educational programming. The organizations will now cooperate on an after-school program that starts Tuesday that is funded by a $1.6 million state grant.

DALTON, Ga. — Some elementary school students may have parents who work in the evening and can’t help them with homework. Others may have parents who don’t work at all and the students live in homes where an evening meal isn’t certain.

“We know that we cannot do everything during the school day,” said Caroline Woodason, director of school support at Dalton Public Schools. “The needs are so great, and there are so many students that need extra help.”

Starting Tuesday, some of Dalton Public Schools’ most at-risk elementary school students will get that help thanks to a five-year, $1.6 million grant the school system and City of Refuge received this year from the Georgia Department of Education.

City of Refuge provides services to low-income families, including transitional housing, a food pantry, a clothing store, education programs for both children and adults, and hot meals.

“It’s called the 21st Century Community Learning Center grant,” said Malisa Pedro, director of education for City of Refuge. “It’s targeted towards school systems that are serving students from low-income families, students who are at risk academically.”

“This is an exciting partnership for Dalton Public Schools,” said Woodason. “This is an opportunity not just for Dalton Public Schools and City of Refuge but the entire community.”

City of Refuge and Dalton Public Schools have partnered for the past four years on summer educational programming. 

The grant provides $321,938 a year for a four-day-a-week after-school program for 125 students from all six of Dalton Public Schools’ elementary schools in grades kindergarten to fifth grade.

About three-quarters of Dalton Public Schools students qualify for free or reduced lunches under a federal program for low-income families. Each school received a certain number of slots for the program based on its share of students qualifying for free or reduced lunches.

“We have only 125 places, but we know we have many more students who could benefit,” said Pedro. “We had a camp this summer serving 100 students. Those students had been referred (by their schools) to that program because they were struggling academically and could benefit from the food security we could provide or just needed some prevention to keep them from falling behind during the summer break. We sent letters to the parents of those students inviting them to apply for the program. From there, I asked teachers, administrators and counselors to refer students from their schools they felt could benefit from this program. I had over 127 more students referred from the schools.”

Pedro then separated those students by school.

“I put all the students from Blue Ridge School on a list, all the students from Brookwood, Westwood and all the others on a list for each school,” she said. “I sent those lists to the principals of each school, and I asked them to get together with their counselors and social workers, and if we had, say, 10 slots for that school, to name the 10 that should be our priority and the rest would be added to a wait list if some of those didn’t choose to take part.”

The program will start at 3:45 each afternoon and run until 6:45 in the evening.

“We will bus them to our facility (at 120 E. Morris St.) and take them home after it’s over,” said Whitney Cawood, director of marketing for City of Refuge.

Part of the programming, obviously, will be educational.

“We’ll be doing homework support,” said Pedro. “But we are going to go beyond that to target any gaps. If they’ve got a reading gap, we are going to work with them on that. If they’ve got a math gap, we’ll target that.”

Two days a week, the children will receive instruction on healthy eating and participate in 30 minutes of exercise.

“It will be an activity that they want to do,” said Pedro. “We’ll have a number of different activities they can choose from. We’ll have a soccer club, a running club, Zumba.”

The other part of the program is enrichment activities.

“We are focusing on the whole child,” said Cawood. “Many of these children have parents who don’t have the time to take them to extracurricular activities or the money to sign them up for different activities. But research has shown a strong link between kids who take part in extracurricular activities and those who go on to college.”

Some of those enrichment activities will include fine arts, various student clubs, social and emotional learning, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) activities.

The Creative Arts Guild, Dalton State College, the Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership, Rock Bridge Community Church, Dalton First United Methodist Church and other local organizations will help with the programming.

“We’ll be giving the parents opportunities, too,” said Woodason. “We’ll have classes for healthy living. We’ll have classes on how they can help tutor their children, and twice a week we’ll have family meals where they have some time to sit and eat with their children. We want to give the parents as much support as the students.”

The parents will be required to take three hours of classes each semester.

“I’m really hoping that our kindergartners and first-graders will go through the entire five-year program,” said Pedro. “I think it will be really exciting to follow the progress they make.”