2018 Annual Report

YOUTH PROGRAM
QUALITY ASSESSMENT
Boys & Girls Clubs of Skagit County staff travel to Vancouver, WA to meet with other Club
professionals with the goal of strengthening Club Programs.
by Heather Greenlaw,
Executive Assistant & Program Quality Coordinator, BGCSC
In mid-November, I traveled south with several of our Club
Staff to attend training in Youth Program Quality Assessment
(YPQA). This training marks the beginning of my role as Program
Quality Coordinator for our organization, and is part of
one of our priority goals from our new strategic plan, Opportunity
2021: Improve Program Quality. Based on data that we
have collected, we are confident that our programs are generally
delivered at a high level. There is, however, always room
to improve our practices and ensure that we are providing our
members with the best club experience possible.
Improve
Assess
The tools developed by the Weikart Center for Youth Program
Quality have been used in our 21st Century Learning Centers
since 2014, and we are expanding this to include all of our
traditional Club sites as well starting in January 2019. Improving
our program quality is a continuous cycle of assess »
plan » improve. Programs are observed and evaluated, a
plan is devised for how to improve based on the scores, and
then the changes are implemented in our clubs based on
those plans. Once the improvement plan is enacted, a new
assessment starts and the cycle begins anew.
Plan
ASSESS
The assessment portion of YPQA is probably the most time
intensive portion of the process, and consists of two components:
a self-assessment conducted through observations
and reflections by the program staff themselves, and
an external assessment conducted by someone outside of
the program. The observation notes are then used to determine
scores for 63 different components of program quality
- these components range from is the space a comfortable
temperature, to do staff encourage youth to try new skills, to
are there mentoring opportunities.
PLAN
Planning for improvement uses the scores, from both the
self-assessment and the external assessment to determine
which areas need to be improved, and devising a strategy to
effect changes to program quality in our clubs.
IMPROVE
Once the areas for improvement have been identified and
a strategy in place, the club staff can then undertake the
work of putting the plan into action: targeted trainings, staff
coaching, discussions of best practices, which are all used
to make adjustments to how our staff deliver programs to
our members.
So, what is my role in all of this, you might ask. As a member
of the Mission Support Team, I am uniquely positioned to
have both an understanding of all of our clubs with their idiosyncrasies,
but also a detached view of programs since I am
not on the front lines day in and day out. I have extensive
training and experience in education and with the emphasis
on Improving Program Quality that came out of the Strategic
Plan work last year, it made sense for the organization to
utilize my background and expertise in working towards that
goal. While the 21st Century Learning Centers already have
External Evaluators as part of their grants, our traditional
Club sites do not. As Program Quality Coordinator, I am
excited to fill that role for our clubs by observing programs,
providing scoring data, and supporting our Club Directors
and Program Staff while they work to improve the quality of
the programs they deliver to our Members.
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