Ask Jeremy King to talk about Tempe’s Kid Zone and you’ll walk away from that encounter amazed at how much you didn’t know about this remarkable community resource.
King oversees the city’s now 30-year-old program for 3,000-plus-or-minus kids at 17 before-and-after-school sites—five of them in the Kyrene district, 12 on Tempe Elementary campuses.
While this represents quite an abundance of different locations, Kid Zone planners don’t lose sight of their singular goal: providing educational opportunities for children K-8 “most any time when school is not in session,” as King describes it.
This means not only before and after school but during summer vacations, seasonal breaks—any other time when there’s going to be a lapse in traditional classroom learning. But, insist the Kid Zone experts, learning doesn’t have to stop just because the regular classroom schedule goes into hibernation.
In Kid Zone’s relaxed, casual setting, program planners find that inquiring young minds can be exposed to such subject areas as fine arts, nutrition, Spanish—a lot of electives that aren’t often found in the school’s required curriculum.
It doesn’t stop there, though.
“We teach things like leadership, empathy, social interaction,” said King. “In class, they don’t have opportunities to work in areas like that.”
To keep this pace of off-time learning moving forward, King says that 25 fulltime employees staff the Kid Zone program, supplemented by a cadre of high school and college students, retirees and others interested in helping kids to broaden their school experience.
While Maricopa County provides a $350,000 grant to the program every year, major local support comes from the Tempe Diablos, which started its support with a $5,000 allocation, this year increasing that to $15,000. The money targets Kid Zone’s efforts in the arena of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), but program administrators also use outside funding from other sources to provide program scholarships to students in Title I schools, including single-parent and dual-working families.
To see just how their group’s efforts impact the Kid Zone schools, a group of Diablos members toured a STEM program at Kyrene de la Mariposa school, watching how the kids’ hands-on experience seemed to awaken a new dimension of excitement for science.
“This is what our staff people see frequently,” said King, “and what helps them see their work not just an assignment but as a real career.”
“said King” ? You wouldn’t write “said he.”