Last year, I worked in one of the local public schools in Athens as an afterschool program teacher. There were about sixty kids who would come to the program every day of the school week. Many of them were there from 2:30 to 6:00, just because their families were not able to leave work any earlier to come and get them.

To me, this was an extremely valuable experience. It was my way of giving back in a way that I could actually see the outcomes of who I was helping. Unlike many community service projects that I could have done for a day and then just forgotten, I was here for a whole year actually seeing what impact I had on these kids' lives.

Parents working long days affects the whole family. Days get long for kids who get to school on the bus at 7:30 in the morning and don’t leave until 6:00 p.m. There were many times when I would have to deal with crying kids who wanted nothing but to go to sleep, but since they weren’t allowed to, they ended up acting up instead. I had to always remind myself to try to be reasonable with them since I knew their days were much longer than even my own day was. Instead of getting on to them for being bad, I would try to figure out what I could do to help.

There was an assumption that many of my coworkers had that the parents who would come in at 6:00, right before they were penalized for being late, just didn’t want to be with their kids. I always thought it was incredibly unfair of them to judge these working parents who had no other option.

Through this experience, I was able to see a completely different part of the school system that I wasn’t personally exposed to when I was in school. Here are a few things that I never even thought about before working here:

A good amount of the students in the program were there, being paid for by government funding. The people taking advantage of this were always hard working and really in need of this extra help. There was one mom who would always get their at 6:00 on the dot, and would get her child, drive her home and then go back to work.

The snack we gave out to the kids at 2:45 was sometimes the last meal some students had until the next morning when they got to school for breakfast. This was something that completely took me for surprise. I never knew the feeling of going to bed hungry, so it hurt my heart to know that these little kids sometimes did not have enough to eat.

Some of the children did not get to see their parents at all during the day. Many children had their grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, and cousins to pick them up because their parents were still at work. It made me think about how I never once was picked up from school by anyone other than my parents, because they didn’t need to rely on my family to come get me. But for so many these kids and their parents, they have no better choice.

Some kids just want someone to talk to. After a long day of school, kids have a lot to say, and I always found myself sitting there, listening to 20 kids tell me about how their days were. I always tried to listen to as many of them as possible becuase I knew I was one of the first people they saw every day after school was over. Becuase of this, I would get thousands of hugs from little kids every day. Even now when I go grocery shopping and run into a kid, they come up and talk to me. It’s so nice to see that these kids appreciated what I did.

Since this was such an eye-opening experience, I definitely recommend anyone with any interest in helping out the community. Here are two sites where you can either work part or full-time helping these kids out.

Boys and Girls Clubs: http://www.greatfuturesathens.com/volunteer-

Clarke County School District Volunteers: http://clarkecountymentorprogram.org/about