TRURO — Families of students at the Truro Central School have been making do without consistent after-school care since the onset of Covid in 2020. But the town announced on Nov. 17 that, after making four new hires, it has now fully staffed its out-of-school-time community sustainability program.
That initiative was funded in a Proposition 2½ override at the annual town meeting and election last spring. The $703,050 override provided funding for three child-care initiatives including the out-of-school-time program. It included $116,000 for school department salaries and an additional $337,050 for the town’s community services budget.
Adam Leiterman will be program supervisor, and the three program leaders are Robin Huibregtse, an artist and writer with a master’s degree in elementary education; recent Nauset Regional High School graduate Julia Morris; and Britta Lower, who studied elementary and special education and has been working as a teacher and curriculum specialist in Florida since 2017.
Leiterman first moved to the Outer Cape in 2005 to work for the National Environmental Education Development (NEED) Academy, a multidistrict program for fifth-graders offered in collaboration with the Cape Cod National Seashore. He then worked as a teacher-naturalist at Mass Audubon’s Boston Nature Center, where he designed programs and supervised a cohort of youth leaders, he said. His nine years at Mass Audubon “left an indelible mark on me,” Leiterman told the Independent. “I hope to use the lessons I learned there to make this the best program it can be.” He began work in Truro on Oct. 30.
Town Manager Darrin Tangeman was involved in the hiring because the positions have transitioned back to town jurisdiction from the school. It has taken time to get the program underway “because we haven’t had the personnel,” Tangeman said. “It’s taken a while to do the recruitment and hiring.”
When the after-school program kicks off in January, it will run five days a week from the end of the school day at 3 until 5:30 p.m.
In this iteration, the program will also offer child care on holidays and professional development days, said Director of Community Services Damion Clements.
On Nov. 10, the town ran a Veterans Day child-care program from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The 15 participants ranged from 5 to 11 years old, Clements said. Leiterman worked that day and was happy with how it went.
“We had a day of playing on the playground, exploring the library garden, playing games in the gym, and having some quiet, reflective time as well,” he said.
The ‘Hot Potato’
This will not be the first time the town has run after-school programming. The school took over from the town’s recreation dept. in 2019, Supt. Stephanie Costigan said, and called its version TAPS — the Truro After-school Program for Students. It served 36 students and was staffed by three educational assistants who worked in the school’s classrooms during the day.
The school staggered staff members’ hours so that they could work part of each school day and then stay on for the program, Costigan said. “Unfortunately, it was too much for the school staff to work during the school day and then do the after-school program, even with the staggered hours,” she said.
The TAPS program shut down when the pandemic began, she said, and the school struggled to revamp it. The main problem, both that year and last year, Costigan said, was staffing.
Truro parent Christine Markowski, who has twin fifth-graders, said she believes the lack of after-school care has been a problem for many families. Her family doesn’t normally need it, she said, but they benefited from it for a week in 2017 when she hurt her back. But when the same thing happened this year, there was nothing available. The back and forth between the town’s recreation dept. and the school makes the program seem “like a hot potato,” she said. “Who’s going to take care of the after-school program?”
Kolby Blehm, who stepped down as chair of the Truro School Committee this past summer, said he did so partly because he was concerned that the program never materialized. “I don’t think there was enough of an effort made to get it off the ground,” Blehm said.
Student services and this specific program had been made part of Costigan’s job, but, he added, “I don’t think anybody really paid attention to the fact that this was an expectation that came with money, and that wasn’t met.”
As of this year, Blehm’s children are no longer enrolled in Truro. They attend kindergarten and second grade in Provincetown.
“We spent an entire year searching for staff to run the program,” Costigan said. “The problem we have is that it’s a brief part of the day.” Advertising at the school and beyond, she said, drew no candidates. “That was why we went back to the town and asked for their help.”
During the summer, the town explored ways to recruit staff. Hiring a contractor was an option, Tangeman said, but expensive. And it wouldn’t have eased the staffing difficulty. “They were just going to manage the program; we were still going to have to hire the people,” Tangeman said.
Tangeman attributes the town’s recent hiring success to the program now being year-round and covering holidays and summer recreation programs.
Fewer Students, But Still a Need
Since 2012, when Truro Central School had more than 150 students, enrollment has been steadily declining. In 2022-2023, total enrollment dropped below 100 for the first time since data became available in 1987. This year, enrollment fell to 91.
The school sent a survey to the families of those 91 students last month to gauge demand for after-school care. The 30 people who responded accounted for a total of about 40 of the school’s students. More than three-quarters of the respondents said they would be interested in enrolling their children in after-school child care, and most of those said they needed child care every day.
After-school activities available at the school from 3 to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday and carpooling and sharing pickup have been stopgaps for some families, Costigan said.
Meanwhile, Leiterman is acquainting himself with the town and preparing for the new program’s January launch. “We will finalize staff training, work on planning collaborations with local organizations, and spend some time at TCS getting to know the students and staff,” he said.
