On Thursday, a clueless Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, held a press conference to discuss the Trump administration’s 2018 budget. In order to justify cutting funding to after-school programs – proposed in order to increase the Defense Department budget by 10% – he told reporters: “There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re helping kids do better in school.”

Mulvaney is, at best, misinformed. At worst, he’s willfully lying about the benefits of these programs to push his boss’s agenda. There’s plenty of evidence that shows these programs are good for kids. I myself am a proud graduate of the after school program system.

My single mother, who worked full time, depended on these after school programs to ensure that I was intellectually stimulated, socialized and safe, until she could pick me up.

She couldn’t afford the luxury of a babysitter. She needed the extra support from my public school, and luckily, they were able to provide a small studio where a dedicated young woman named Viola taught me how to swing dance a couple times a week.

Viola’s class fostered our creativity and created a sense of community among her displaced after school students. We stayed out of trouble. We drank dusty Capri Suns hidden in a box in the costume closet. I met some of closest friends in that mirrored room where I would eventually get very good at the Charleston.

Viola was also the choreographer of the Spring musical, and recruited me to audition, which I did, ever year, until I switched schools. Thus began my love affair with the theatre, which introduced me to Shakespeare, and lasted throughout high school and college. Theatre was one of the first places I felt comfortable; it gave me a sense of belonging and boosted my confidence. After school activities had a ripple effect in my life that I can still feel today.

For these reasons, it is difficult for me to fathom how any person could say that these programs aren’t helping kids. Cutting their funding snatches opportunities away from those students who don’t have them anywhere else, who might not otherwise have access to the arts, who find a second home in the community and encouragement of their teachers and peers.

Mulvaney’s plan is nothing short of cruel. Kids deserve better than a government that wants to force schools to dissolve their after school programs, and then abandon the families who depend on them.



These proposed budget cuts are yet another attempt by Trump and his cronies to punish the poor. Kids like me, whose hardworking parents nevertheless struggled, know that these programs are invaluable. But this administration is so far removed from the needs of poor people – a demographic whom they promised to champion –that they can’t see why these programs matter.

My mother should never have to feel ashamed or guilty that she couldn’t always pick her daughter up from school. Yet the officials elected to serve the needs of people like her continue to introduce policies that will make their lives harder.

According to the Afterschool Alliance, 11.3 million children take care of themselves after school. They also mention that on school days, from 3 pm to 6 pm are the “peak hours for juvenile crime and experimentation with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and sex.”

When Mulvaney falsely claims that he can’t “prove” that “these programs are going to help these kids do better in school and get better jobs,” I think of myself and the kids I knew back then. Some of them are community leaders and advocates now, others have master degrees. We excelled, not despite our circumstances, but because our circumstances allowed for after school programs that gave us a chance to reach our potential.

If these programs help just handful of kids graduate, or pick up a book, or not feel so alone after school, then they are worth it, period.

I hope, though I am not confident, that if Mulvaney is going to revoke funding to these programs, he has a plan to ease the burden of parents who want the best for their kids but can’t afford it, and to keep vulnerable students safe. If he’s so convinced that after school programs don’t work, I challenge him to come up with a new system that does.

Perhaps he can babysit the millions of children who will be left on their own when his budget goes into effect.