Clayton Child Care, Inc.

Clayton is committed to offering a fun, safe, and nurturing environment where kids can learn and grow while their parents finish their workday.

Clayton staff is dedicated to preparing children to lead great lives. This means evolving to meet the diverse needs of our students and their families. To that end, Clayton recently launched a new initiative focused on developing stronger social and emotional learning skills in our students and staff. The goal of the Social and Emotional Learning Initiative is to prepare students for personal success by teaching and modeling the skills that teachers, parents and principals have identified as most needed in their schools. These include: self-management; self-awareness; responsible decision-making; social awareness and interpersonal/relationship skills.

It is our belief that a strong foundation of healthy social and emotional skills will allow children to grow up to be responsible and productive members of our communities.

After-school is an ideal place to learn and practice interpersonal and leadership skills. With less structure than the school day, students in after-school programs have more time to interact with their peers. Whether students are working on a robot, playing a board game or planning a community service project, each decision or conversation is an opportunity to practice being together in healthy relationships and , practice self-management.

Children must see the adult role models in their life practicing these skills as well. In addition to utilizing research-based social and emotional learning curriculum, Clayton staff is trained to model the behaviors and to embed learning and practice into every activity and into the culture of the after-school program. Regular program evaluation will use proven assessments to both qualitatively and quantitatively measure improvement in individual students social and emotional skills as well as program environment.

As a nonprofit provider of licensed child care for over 45 years, Clayton has the staff and infrastructure to support our programs and the implementation of the Social and Emotional Learning Initiative. With around 7,000 students served annually pre-pandemic, our site staff has proven their ability to provide high-quality programming every day after school and over the summer.

In addition to developing our existing staff and hiring others with the knowledge and experience run our programs and to lead implementation of the Social and Emotional Learning Initiative, Clayton has developed many solid partnerships in our 40 years of serving the families of Tarrant County. These partners bring their expertise to enhance our staff training, program development and evaluation capabilities.

Clayton has a solid record of providing engaging, high- quality after-school programs in our community. In fact, for several years now we have had the joy of welcoming second and third generation "Clayton Kids" into our after school community - we must be doing a lot of things right! But the needs of families in our community are always changing, so we have, over our 40 years, added more formal evaluation systems to help guide our progress. The increases in our student's positive behaviors and attendance have been modest, but statistically significant. We know that after-school programs are part of a larger education picture and Clayton's leadership believes that helping children to gain social and emotional skills that they will use throughout their life is an ideal fit for the after-school environment. We look forward to fully integrating our Social and Emotional Learning Initiative into all of our programs to equip children to live great lives.

As we move forward, Clayton has partnered with the Center on Evaluation and Research at Southern Methodist University to help with both formative assessment and high quality evaluation of program quality and impact. This partnership will measure the impact of our Clayton Quest Academic Enrichment curriculum designed specifically for mixed-age after-school programs with the goal of achieving research-based certification by 2025.