By Mike Rutledge
NKyTribune contributor
One recent Monday, more than 30 students from Boone County’s Goodridge Elementary School were happily spending time at their school, long after most classmates had gone home.
The students arrived at the school an hour before their counterparts, yet, unmistakably, they were joyful about it.
Some of the first-through-fifth-graders actually beamed after finishing the homework part of their afternoon, waiting excitedly in the cafeteria for an experiment that would have them try to pop balloons with orange peels.
They cheered with excitement as they moved from one activity to the next.
After the older ones finished making Power Point presentations about good manners, while younger kids made computer illustrations about how to behave properly, it was time to go outside and play for a while.
This is a new wave of after-school programs, combined with before-school activities, that focus on the academics that helps these Goodridge Cardinals soar in the classroom.
It also feed their spirits through fun activities like dance, music, swimming, science experiments, technology use – and coming soon, archery.
“They’re smiling, they’re happy,” said Assistant Principal Genny Sullivan. “They’re not complaining that they want to go home.”
Pretty impressive for kids who, from Monday through Thursday, are at the school from 7:30 a.m. until 6 p.m.
Each morning starts with half an hour of academic work and 30 minutes of physical activity.
“It’s going to be an awesome program,” said site coordinator Krystle Hegener, a certified teacher who also has run Boone County parks camps programs and is being paid $13.46 an hour for the program that extends for the duration of the school year.
Boone County Schools recently was awarded the $150,000, three-year, 21st Century Learning Grant, and the program started Sept. 8.
“We have so many activities lined up and community members who are willing to come in and lead some of our sessions, and hopefully bump up some of our test scores and academic scores and academic achievement,” Hegener said.
When school ends at 3:40 p.m., students check in at the cafeteria for a snack, and a 10-minute Leader in Me program that builds social skills and classroom confidence. They then break into grade levels and spend an hour receiving homework assistance from certified teachers.
Later, they transition to more fun activities, such as learning why it’s sometimes possible to run a wooden dowel through a balloon without making it pop, or how the acid from an orange peel can seep through the polymers of an over-inflated balloon and burst it. On this day, one girl seemed sad to have to part with her bright pink balloon, but she smiled through it all.
Before the experiments and other activities, second-grader Patrick Gosser proudly showed off the geology skills he learned because he finished his homework early. He correctly identified almost all the rocks in a small collection.
“I like the colors of them,” Gosser said. As for program, ? “I like the activities best.”
“The activities change depending on the day,” Sullivan said. “This is where we’re going to get our community involvement.”
Among groups expected to help with the fun are Boone County Parks, the 4H extension office and Turning Point dance studios.
To be invited to the program, at least initially, students had to receive free or reduced-price lunches, making them at risk, be in special-education programs, or learning English as a second language.
“We pulled from those populations first,” Sullivan said. “Now that we have these students here, some of the other kids have been seeing them outside doing physical activity in the morning and they want to know all about it.”
Boone County Parks Director David Whitehouse said the idea of the program is to help kids who need help with their education.
“But if it were strictly all education, eventually you’d lose their attention,” Whitehouse said. “There’d be some kids who would say, ‘I don’t want to go because I’d rather go home and have fun.’”
These kids have fun after school – and another half hour of physical activity before school starts – with the added bonus that “pretty much by the time we leave, the kids have got all their homework done, so that kind of helps the kids and the parents as well,” Whitehouse said.
Hegener and others at the school will measure students’ academic progress through the three years of the program.
“I think the promise is just great,” Hegener said. “I expect to see the test scores just skyrocket. I expect our kids to be so much more socially involved with each other, with their communities, their families, even their teachers.”
“I can’t wait to see how they’re doing in the classroom, once we really get the ball rolling, and just see how their behavior improves, their academic success improves, all of those things.”
Whitehouse says he and other parks employees enjoy helping because they can talk about education-related stuff while still having fun.
The parks were asked to be asked to partner because Whitehouse is familiar with the grant program and the school.
“We’ve been doing our adult basketball leagues and adult volleyball leagues over there every year at the school, and then we actually run a summer camp ourselves there all summer,” Whitehouse said. “So it was kind of a natural partnership.”
As part of the 21st Century program, there will also be a two-week summer camp for the students.
Organizations interested in becoming involved can call Goodridge Elementary School at (859) 334-4420.