CASP to close in May after 48 years serving Norman students

After nearly 50 years of providing after-school care and enrichment for Norman kids, the Community After School Program will shut its doors for good next month.

CASP has partnered with Norman Public Schools for decades to offer childcare to NPS students, but the district announced this spring it will move forward with AlphaBEST Education, a national provider, for before and after-school programming in the coming school year.

The district decision to use AlphaBEST comes after NPS put out a request for bids for after-school services in fall 2021, opening the service to CASP and any other interested provider. CASP Director Terri Craig said CASP was notified this process would happen one day before the district opened for bids.

The district drew seven interested providers, ultimately choosing AlphaBEST, a district spokesperson said.

“Students will experience an innovative, world-class curriculum designed to spark curiosity and expand creativity in arts, robotics, coding, drama, foreign language, fitness activities, homework help, and more, all at a cost lower than what our families are currently experiencing,” NPS spokesperson Wes Moody said.

CASP will close at the end of this school year and will not be able to offer summer programming. AlphaBEST will not offer summer programming this year, but is currently open for enrollment for the 2022-23 school year.

For CASP staff, the news has been difficult to process.

“Forever, forever we’ll be a CASP family — that’s just who we are, and I’m so very proud of the people who have come through, and so very happy for the families that have the opportunity to access these services, because it is absolutely unique,” Craig said. “There’s just nobody else quite like us.”

Parting ways

CASP has grown through the years to serve about 600 students each year with a staff of about 80-90. The organization has traditionally been a space for students to find after-school enrichment and community, with the available tutoring and homework time, Craig said.

But Craig said it seemed NPS wanted to pursue an option that focused more on making up for learning loss and providing extra post-school education.

“A student who participates in a well-rounded after-school program each day receives approximately 525 additional hours of school-linked care by the end of the academic year,” Moody said. “This valuable time is equivalent to 84 additional school days. We recognize this as an opportunity to create more robust opportunities—ones that foster physical health and social-emotional wellbeing, while also supporting students’ academic growth and increasing their opportunities to reach their full potential.”

Ultimately, CASP’s priority in programming has been offering a safe place for students after school, and creating enriching programing for kids, Craig said. CASP offers curriculum to the 4- to 12-year-olds it serves, but has never been the “extension of the school day” NPS seemed to be looking for, Craig said.

“In our experience, families who access after-school programming do so for their convenience — they don’t necessarily do it for additional education for their child” Craig said. “Our surveys to our parents, the most they asked from us was homework assistance … and even then, most parents didn’t want us to force their child to do homework, but we always made that time available, we set aside that time … our experience with our parents always has been that they want their children to be in a relaxed environment with their peers where they can have great opportunities for enrichment.”

Craig said while NPS has pointed out that the new national program will be cheaper for families, she doesn’t see that it’ll be any cheaper than the services CASP already offers.

CASP runs at $80 weekly for childcare, but also operates on a sliding scale and has scholarships available for families that need them. The new service will be $76 a week, Craig said.

“In addition to that lower base rate, AlphaBest offers several discounts to families including sibling discounts, military discounts and discounts for families who qualify for free or reduced meals,” the district said. “They also accept DHS subsidy vouchers. They will also offer before and after-school care to students of NPS employees at no charge. CASP was unable to offer all those benefits.”

Prior to the pandemic, CASP served 20-25% low income families, Craig said [during the pandemic, it became harder to tell families’ financial statuses as parents were in and out of work]. The program also offers a 25% tuition discount for NPS employees.

Funding and staffing became an issue for the program with the pandemic and in the last few months especially. Craig said one-on-one tutoring was on hold for a while during the pandemic, and tutoring and volunteering is just starting to come back.

In December, after CASP put in a bid to provide NPS services, CASP lost student staff to graduation or transfers, and was struggling to hire, Craig said. The organization was forced to close programing at a few NPS schools, she said.

“We made the most conservative decision we could, and the impact was to 75 children — that was the fewest number of children we could have impacted — and it was horrible, it was absolutely horrible,” Craig said. “…That’s kind of hard to hear that that is now being framed as the cause — to our knowledge, the reason was that they (NPS) wanted someone to come in and provide more educational after-school programming than what we provide.”

AlphaBEST will be offering programming at all elementary schools along with NPS middle schools, Moody said.

Building careers, relationships

With 48 years’ legacy in Norman, CASP has impacted not only thousands of children, but countless staffers.

Program managers Hannah Hullinger and Jordan Payne have both worked with CASP for 15 years now; they came to CASP while at OU and never left. They’ve been with CASP long enough that their former students have become CASP staff themselves.

Payne met his wife in CASP.

“It’s devastating, it’s heartbreaking — not only will we not get to see each other every day, but we won’t get to see the kids that we’ve had in summer program since they were in kindergarten, and we won’t get to see the families that we’ve had for years because they’ve had siblings in our programs for years,” Hullinger said. “I’ve had kids that I had in college when I was at a site, they’re now out of college at this point, and some of them have kids of their own. We’ve been here for a long time, and that’s the saddest part is not being in the community working like we would be.”

Parker Manek has circled back to CASP in his career, and said that whatever the next after-school option for Norman kids looks like, he’s not sure it’ll have the staying power and lack of turnover CASP established.

“Nonprofits are kind of a mixed bag, but this one is really, really excellent — the board of directors all really care and are really invested … all the executive staff, they’re very invested in making sure not only that we’re providing quality care for families and for the norman community, but take care of each other and all of us here,” Manek said. “There’s just something to be said for it being around as long as it has been.”

Craig said it’s not unusual for an OU student to come to CASP for a part-time job, then stay on full time.

“We’ve always been heavily invested in our human resources here … when you hear families talk about CASP, you still hear about the individuals that their children connected with at a site level,” she said. “Even my son — he had an individual that be connected with at the site level who he still talks about, and he’s 31. It’s about those relationships, those mentoring relationships.”

The organization’s staff, outside of its administrative office, is almost entirely OU students, a likely function of its part-time hours and the experience it offers, Craig said. Staff know they can come to Craig or Director of Child Services Brenda Birdsong for help, she said.

It’s been a place for many students to learn whether or not they actually want to go into education, or to learn the classroom control and planning skills that prepare them for their first education job, she said.

“We always have considered CASP a training ground for future educators, and the staff that work at CASP have always had just a leg up as far as communication with parents in particular, and also classroom management … they always have an edge,” Craig said.

Prior to CASP, there wasn’t a Norman option for latchkey kids whose parents got off work hours after school ended. The organization was a grassroots effort, the product of a group of citizens coming together in 1974 to create a resource that kept kids safe after school, Craig said.

CASP allowed Norman families to adapt with the times and become dual income households, serving a need that became critical even in her own family.

“Families were able to earn a living when two-income families became a requirement again in the 70s and school still ended at 3:30 and children didn’t have anywhere to be, CASP came in and made that possible, made it possible for businesses to have workers who were focused and whose children were safe in a supervised and enriching environment and the big bonus on top of that was that every person who came through as a worker gained practical experience for their future careers. And the districts who hired them throughout Texas and Oklahoma … were able to hire someone who came in ready to go.”

For parents in need of before or after-school services in the 2022-23 school year, AlphaBEST and NPS are currently enrolling. Parents can visit AlphaBEST.org/normanok to enroll, attend a family information night or call student services at 405-366-5844 for questions or more information. Family information nights will be 6-8 p.m. May 3 at both Monroe Elementary and Longfellow Middle School, or 6-8 p.m. May 4 at Jackson Elementary and Kennedy Elementary.