Dear friends,

During these uncertain times, we want you to know that we’re here for you. Your safety, and those of the families and children you serve, is our highest priority.

We will be communicating regularly through email and on our website, providing you with information, resources, training, professional development opportunities, and help however we can. While Network staff are all working from home, we are also available for phone consultation to help program directors develop plans to keep staff engaged.

All of this will be provided for free through the end of June at least, and possibly longer if we are able.

To start, you can help us by letting us know how COVID-19 is affecting your afterschool program and sharing with us your creative ideas on the best ways to ensure kids are safe and supervised. Please take our quick five question survey here.

https://forms.gle/VMD7sk17t5ByJUEX6

If you are not working right now, we’ve gotten many questions about unemployment eligibility. The best source of information can be found here. http://www.ctdol.state.ct.us/UI-online/index.htm

If you are working from home, we can help you use this time productively through online professional development, curriculum and lesson plan development, summer camp planning, trainings and on-line meetings, like our Calming the Chaos over Coffee virtual roundtables on Mondays at 10 am.

Likewise, we encourage afterschool professionals to take this time to contribute to the larger field. This could be developing curriculum that can be shared, creating blog posts for our website, and taking part in webinars offered by the Connecticut After School Network and other organizations that connect to your work, sharing ideas and questions on our Facebook and Twitter.

Our central information hub will be the blog on our website where we will be continuously posting new resources and opportunities https://ctafterschoolnetwork.org/blog/

If you have questions or are interested in any of these opportunities please reach out to our Director of Professional Development and Research, Ken Anthony, Ed.D. (kanthony@ctafterschoolnetwork.org) or our Executive Director, Michelle Cunningham (mdc@ctafterschoolnetwork.org) for more information.

Let’s keep connected, and let us know what else we can do to help.