Statewide Professional Development System

School’s Out is leading a statewide collaboration to build a comprehensive professional development system for Washington State. When this work is completed, our state will have a professional development system which includes core competencies, a professional registry, a career and wage ladder, and an online training catalog listing professional development opportunities statewide.

Using the Kansas and Missouri Core Competencies for Youth Development Professionals as a framework, a collaborative statewide subcommittee has completed the final document, Washington State Core Competencies for Child and Youth Development Professionals. This document defines the knowledge and skills AYD professionals need in order to provide quality services for children, youth and their families in our state.

Children and youth spend nearly 80 percent of their waking hours outside of school. During those hours they continue to learn, develop, and test boundaries. Thousands of Washington State children and youth spend this time in afterschool and youth development (AYD) programs. Research has shown that high quality AYD programs increase kids’ self-esteem and academic performance while decreasing crime and risky behaviors. To produce these outcomes, programs must have trained and educated staff.

The AYD field in Washington does not currently have a system for training and educating the workforce in what they need to provide high quality services to children and youth. While AYD workers have some training opportunities, they face low wages, little acknowledgement of their educational attainment, and a lack of a professional identity. Programs experience high turnover and recruitment costs as staff leaves to pursue other jobs. As a result, kids and families lose relationships and consistency from their AYD programs.

School’s Out Washington received funding from the Paul G. Allen Family Foun dation to take bold steps to create a statewide professional development system. With this funding, School’s Out Washington conducted a comprehensive study, gleaning information from existing research and gathering new data from focus groups and surveys of professionals working in the afterschool and youth development (AYD) field, to create the framework for a professional development system in our state. The final study, “A Well-Prepared Workforce Brings out the Best in our Kids: A Framework for a Professional Development System for the Afterschool and Youth Development Workforce of Washington State,” outlines seven components necessary to build a comprehensive system. The study's executive report explains the seven components identified.

In the late spring of 2008, two stakeholder meetings were conducted to review the final report and make recommendations on which of the seven components should be tackled first. Ellen Gannett, with the National Institute on Out of School Time (NIOST) at the Wellesley Centers for Women, led a gathering in June 2008 with approximately 30 stakeholders connected to Washington’s AYD community. At that meeting, three priority areas emerged as the goals to pursue in Phase One of the Professional Development Plan:

Develop a theory of change and a measurement of outcome designed to help determine if a program or strategy is achieving its intended results.
Develop an agreed upon set of core competencies that are endorsed by key partners.
Develop a unified professional identity for workers in the AYD field.

The evaluation outcome map , along with a companion narrative, were completed in November 2009. In addition, the Next Generation Youth Work Coalition conducted a review of exisiting Youth Work Core Competencies frameworks and purposes to help inform the work in Phase One.

Our next step will be to analyze the feedback on the core competencies and identity of the profession we recieved from the AYD field statewide through meetings and an online survey which closed June 9, 2010. We will continue to update this page with more information as the process progresses.