The Canyon After School Program (CASP) will no longer be in service as of May 2015. The services will be transferred to the Maverick’s Boys and Girls Club of Amarillo.

CASP was formed in 1989 with 26 attending students and three staff members, and has since grown to encompass more than 700 students and 68 staff members across 11 campuses in both Amarillo and Canyon. Senate Bill 503 created the Expanded Learning Opportunities Council to create a state-wide plan to extend learning opportunities in public after school programs. Debbie Collier has been the director of CASP since the beginning.

“Since 1989, it’s been supervised recreation,” Collier said. “We decided it was time for somebody to do something different, and this was the perfect opportunity. We’ve done CASP for 25 years, and sometimes it’s just time to let someone else take over and make some changes, and education seems to always be changing.”

Kimber Daniel is the director of the Amarillo Boys and Girls Club. The club encompasses many education components, including a program called Academic Success.

“We have a power hour where kids have their homework help,” Daniel said. “We partner with Sylvan Learning Centers and we do reading classes with them, and math classes, and in the summer we do a science project with them.”

Daniel said one of the Club’s goals is to make sure the students are ready to move on the next grade, and plans on working in conjunction with the schools to do so.

“We want to instill in them a desire to graduate from high school,” Daniel said. “For those kids that will be able to do so, we want them to go on to a secondary education, college. But for those kids that college isn’t a good fit for them, we want them to be able to go to technical schools, or whatever that might be.”

The Boys and Girls club also has healthy lifestyle program known as Triple Play.

“We work on the kids’ healthy eating habits,” Daniel said. “We talk about what foods you should eat and what foods you shouldn’t eat.”

The Boys and Girls Club is partnered with the High Plains Food Bank Kids Café to serve a hot meal to the students.

“They’ll eat dinner before they go home at night, which will be, sometimes, a huge help to the parents if they work two jobs or they’re busy,” Daniel said. “They’ll know that the kids had a good hot meal as opposed to a snack.”

The Boys and Girls Club also has clubs geared towards each child’s interest, including, but not limited to, builder’s club, which is a leadership group, cooking club, gardening club and a photography club, along with athletics.

“So what we’ll do when we get to Canyon is we’ll talk to those kids and find out some things they are interested in and then work on it,” Daniel said. “We also have our good character and citizenship that we work with our kids on. We teach them how to win, how to lose, how to be a good sport, how to wait your turn. We work on all those things so that the kids don’t get mad when they don’t win.”

The prices for childcare will remain the same. The new staff will be trained for a week during the summer. Daniel hopes some of the former CASP staff members will continue with the Boys and Girls Club. Daniel said the Club has big shoes to fill.

“We are so excited to be able to come to Canyon,” Daniel said. “We’re not going to run in and make all of these changes at one time, and run people off. That’s not what we want to do. We want to enhance what’s there and make the fit, make kids feel safe and be a good role model, which is what Miss Debbie already does, and we just want to continue that.”

Collier plans on staying in the school district as a consultant during the first year of transition.

“They have one on-sight after school program in Amarillo, so coming up and assuming 11 afterschool sites is going to be a challenge, so I’m going to stick around for a year and help them out,” Collier said. “It’s going to be a big job. And we want it to successful, because we worked really hard for a lot of years to make it what it is, so we want to make sure it keeps a good reputation.”