Outreach

Over the next few months, I'll be taking the Crickets program on the road. The no-longer-shelved grant is finally getting off the ground and reaching teens in after school programs.

And not a minute too soon.

I met with the director of one of the after school teen clubs I'll be taking the program to, to get a feel for their layout, talk about the requirements, and discuss options for the program. I'll spend 8 hours total at each of the clubs, and it had seemed like enough until I saw this one. In a tiny town in the middle of the mountains, this is a club that barely scrapes by, and offers everything from meals to a place to sleep, games to educational programming. The kind of place that deserves all kinds of support from its community. Not the kind of place that should be broken into to have its new computers stolen. No, not even stolen - gutted. Anything that wasn't traceable. Same as the library and the school that share the parking lot. WHO DOES THAT???

Grr...

I'm taking technology to these kids. I'm bringing them toys that none of them will have access to outside of our 8 hours together. It's not enough. But at least it's something. When I did this with the kids during summer camp, half of the families were talking about getting the kits for their kids after the program. They didn't have to worry about having the computer or the money for the kit. The kids I'll see in this after school program? Maybe 1 of them has a personal computer with internet. They'll be in the workforce a lot sooner than those kids I saw this summer, they'll need the skills for college (if they go). And they don't have access to it outside of a computer class.

We need to overhaul education and the economy. This isn't acceptable.