Mayor Karl Dean today announced that the Wallace Foundation has awarded a grant of $765,000 to strengthen and expand the Nashville After Zone Alliance (NAZA), an initiative he started to provide free, high-quality afterschool programs for at-risk students in Nashville middle schools.

NAZA currently serves 400 students, and the grant will allow the program to nearly triple in size by serving an additional 750 students. Nashville was among just nine cities singled out to receive grants because of its leadership and commitment to afterschool programs.

“We are investing in afterschool programs because we know that when middle school students have engaging experiences, they are much more likely to stay interested in school and graduate from high school – which is not only good for them, but good for our entire city,” Dean said.

“We have been expanding NAZA strategically, and as our city’s budget allows,” he said. “With this grant from the Wallace Foundation, our expansion plans will be expedited greatly. Students who would have been out of middle school by the time this program reached their neighborhood will now have the benefit of participating in NAZA. We will never know just how many dropouts this grant will help us prevent, but we know its impact will be big.”

NAZA was formed in 2009 by Dean as a partnership between the Mayor’s Office and Metro Nashville Public Schools to provide free afterschool programs for students who couldn’t participate in existing programs due to cost or transportation issues. Programs are run by multiple youth-serving Nashville organizations either on-site at Metro middle schools or at community-based sites. There are currently 18 afterschool NAZA sites that offer academic and enrichment activities, including art and music.

The grant from the New York-based national Wallace Foundation will help underwrite the launch of a new zone each fall for the next three years, starting with a Northwest Zone next school year for students in the Whites Creek/Pearl-Cohn clusters and a Southeast Zone in 2013 for students in the Cane Ridge/Antioch clusters.

The first NAZA program was launched two years ago in the Northeast Zone with the Martha O’Bryan Center as its coordinating agency, serving more than 200 Maplewood and Stratford cluster students, in partnership with the Village Community Development Corp., the YMCA and the YWCA.

The South Central Zone was added last year to serve an additional 200 students from the Glencliff and Overton cluster schools. Partners include the PENCIL Foundation, Metro Parks, the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee, the YMCA, Catholic Charities and the YWCA.

Other cities receiving the system-building grants are Baltimore, Denver, Fort Worth, Grand Rapids, Jacksonville, Louisville, Philadelphia and St. Paul. Cities were selected for being well-positioned to build on work they had already started. Fewer than 10 percent of Metro Schools’ low-income middle-school students currently get an opportunity for safe and enriching afterschool programming.

“Research tells us that more children and teens can get access to high-quality afterschool experiences when communities coordinate the work of the many different groups involved,” said Nancy Devine, director of communities at the Wallace Foundation. “We want to encourage more cities to adopt this system-building approach, and one of the things we can expect to see is more cooperation between schools and afterschool programs as they collaborate to better the education of our neediest urban kids.”

About the Wallace Foundation The Wallace Foundation is an independent, national foundation dedicated to supporting and sharing effective ideas and practices that expand learning and enrichment opportunities for children. The Foundation maintains an online library of lessons at www.wallacefoundation.org about what it has learned, including knowledge from its current efforts aimed at: strengthening educational leadership to improve student achievement; helping disadvantaged students gain more time for learning through summer learning and an extended school day and year; enhancing out-of-school time opportunities; and building appreciation and demand for the arts.