Too old for child care?

July 22, 2005

JOEL DAVIDSON\Frontiersman reporter

MAT-SU - Hundreds of middle-school-age kids in the Mat-Su area are caught between being too young for self-governance and too old for child care.

For many of these adolescents, their working parents have careers that don't allow them to care for kids immediately after school. Unfortunately, this often leads to long, unsupervised hours in which the youths have nothing structured to do and nowhere in particular to go.

During the school year, Pat Kilmain, director of the Palmer Public Library, said she sees middle-school kids wander over to the library about 15 minutes after school lets out.

"A lot hang out here, inside and outside the library," she said Monday. "This is just a warm, dry place where people will tolerate them."

For the most part, she said the kids are welcome to use the free computers and read books, but Kilmain said she doesn't encourage kids to just hang out.

"We only kick them out if they get too rambunctious or talk back to the staff," she said. "Unfortunately, 90 percent of them are not here to study."

Over the last two years, however, the Salvation Army's after-school program has taken some of the pressure off the Palmer library.

During the school year, Salvation Army runs a program Monday through Friday, from 2-6 p.m. The program focuses on character building, homework tutoring and a host of reading, monitoring and educational opportunities. On Thursdays, the organization even feeds the kids free dinner.

"Our mission is to reach families of low income that can't afford reasonable day care and kids who are not old enough for a job but are old enough to get into trouble," said Christina Michels, the after-school youth program director.

During the past two years, the program has grown more popular, Michels said.

"Increased need? Absolutely," she said. "It started off with six people and the numbers are obviously higher."

The free, volunteer program now runs throughout the school year and serves between 20 and 30 kids, most falling between grades six and eight.

The problem, however, is that many kids have no place to go once they outgrow child-care facilities. Most child-care facilities only serve children up to age 12, and even then, very few 12-year-olds willingly attend.

"It's very difficult for older kids to fit in," said Chenelle Zoerb, the school-age program director at Profiles of Excellence, an after-school facility in Palmer. "It's geared more towards the younger age group."

Nationally, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 41 percent of the 4.4 million children between the ages of 12 and 14 regularly care for themselves.

Boys and Girls Club in Wasilla serves more than 100 of these so called latch-key kids during the school year and other organizations like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts hold after-school meetings at a number of Mat-Su schools. Even with these safety nets, many kids still go without supervision until their parents return from work.

The lack of supervision can result in shoplifting, vandalism, drug and alcohol abuse and a host of other misdemeanor crimes.

Nancy Hall, the Mat-Su Youth Court clerk, said nearly all the crimes the organization deals with involve 13- to 18-year-olds, with the majority of those incidents involving substance abuse and theft.

"Shoplifting knows no bounds," she said, "but with school-age kids, it is usually after school or on the weekends."

Lebron McPhail, director of education for the Mat-Su Borough School District, said the district doesn't have any organized after-school programs apart from standard sports and co-curricular activities.

"It's a question of where the funding source is," he said. "We are sort of at the bare bones for this sort of thing."

The program manager for Child Care Connection, Carol Jensen, said the majority of what she called latch-key kids have parents who commute back and forth to work.

"Those kids should not be home alone," she said. "They get out of school and parents don't get home 'til 6:30, seven at night. For that middle-school-aged child, it is really difficult."

Contact Joel Davidson at

352-2266, or joel.davidson@

frontiersman.com.