County Executive Leggett Receives Top Afterschool Champion Award
April 27, 2009, Rockville, MD--The Afterschool Alliance has selected County Executive Ike Leggett to be one of eight honorees from across the country to receive the Afterschool Champion award. The honorees will be recognized for their extraordinary work in advancing afterschool programming at a Breakfast for Champions on April 28th at the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. Since assuming the office of County Executive in late 2006, Mr. Leggett has been a strong supporter of after school programming in several ways.
Mr. Leggett powerfully communicates the value of after school services as an investment that will pay off in the long-term as our children and youth become productive, fulfilled adults. He uses his own experiences as a youth with a particularly important sports coach as an example of the power of a caring adult in a safe setting to put young people on the right path. He knows the importance, first hand, of developing an integrated framework that would work to ensure quality in out-of-school time program expansion and that would serve to leverage public funding with private dollars.
His first budget for FY2008 included $100,000 to begin the creation of the local out-of-school time system to address one of his eight policy priorities, “Preparing Children to Live and Learn.” This funding went to the Montgomery County Collaboration Council for Children, Youth and Families, Inc., a state and locally designated Local Management Board, that created the Excel Beyond the Bell. Laugh. Learn. Achieve brand identity along with facilitating the Excel Beyond the Bell Partnership which is led by a group of high ranking public officials, and private organization and other community stakeholders.
As a result of this investment, the Excel Beyond the Bell Funder’s Network has been created, in partnership with the Montgomery County Community Foundation, and has raised over $80,000 to support the out-of-school time system in Montgomery County. Meanwhile, the Excel Beyond the Bell Partnership continues to:
- increase community awareness and political will to support the out-of-school time system;
- set quality standards and support youth worker professional development and organizational capacity-building;
- conduct research on supply and demand, and capacity of local out-of-school time resources; and
- implement a universal out-of-school time program performance measures and analysis of effectiveness.
