Over the past three years, San Diego Unified has made big moves on the after-school care front.
Between August 2022 and September 2025, the district increased the number of schools that offer PrimeTime – the district’s free before- and after-school care program for K-8 students – by more than two dozen. Over that same period, they also more than doubled the number of students enrolled.
Now, hot on the heels of a huge injection of new state funding for the program, district officials are set on expanding. But it won’t be easy.
After-school care is a quiet killer for parents. It’s in desperately short supply and is often a crushing financial burden. That’s especially true for working parents, whose jobs necessitate after-school care, and who are often the least capable of paying for it.
A lack of after-school care can be truly devastating to some. Years ago, I profiled the struggle of one single father who’s entire life was thrown into chaos because of the vexing dilemma so many working parents face.
That dilemma is simple, said San Diego Unified Trustee Shana Hazan, who’s made pushing for the district to expand its before- and after-school care offerings a priority.
“If you have a job, assuming it’s nine to five, those hours do not line up with the typical hours of the school day,” Hazan said. “Everybody knows it’s extremely problematic and stressful and has significant financial implications.”
At the federal level, news has been bleak. President Donald Trump is crusading to abolish the Department of Education, for a time froze more than $14 million in grants for after-school care programs and even threatened to eliminate a half-century old program that provides free care to low-income families.
Even so, some elected officials across the country are increasingly waking up to the need to do something about the crisis. Upstart Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani has made providing free, universal child care a key plank in his campaign for mayor of New York City. The Governor of New Mexico even announced earlier this month that the state would become the first in the United States to offer universal child care starting in November.
California has also taken steps toward providing more support for parents in need of childcare.
In the shadow of the pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a new, multi-billion-dollar a year program meant to help combat the ubiquitous learning loss students experienced during Covid school closures. That initiative launched the extended learning opportunities program, or ELOP. In the years since, it’s funneled about $14 billion into not only before- and after-school programs but also expanded summer school offerings.
That funding drove much of San Diego Unified’s ability to expand its after-school care program over the past three years. Between August 2022 and August 2025, the district more than doubled the number of students enrolled in its after-school care program, PrimeTime, from 6,765 to 15,104.
Then, July brought another huge funding coup.
First, some fine print. The state allocates ELOP funds based on what percentage of that district’s students are what’s called “unduplicated pupils.” That’s a fancy bucket term for students who meet criteria like being an English language learner, being homeless, qualify for free and reduced priced meals or are a foster youth.
Districts have historically been split into two funding tiers. Ones where at least 75 percent of students were unduplicated pupils received tier 1 funding, which gave them $2,750 per student in funding for ELOP. All other districts received tier two funding, which amounted to $1,580 per student.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2025-26 budget changed those thresholds. In it, the unduplicated pupil threshold for tier 1 funding was lowered to 55 percent. San Diego Unified didn’t qualify for tier 1 funding before, but with the change, it now did. That change brought in about $36 million in additional funding.
Hazan believes the funding boon will allow the district to implement what has been one of her chief goals: universal after-school care for San Diego Unified parents.
“This really is game changing for local families and for kids,” Hazan said.
That goal is much easier said than done, though.
For one, because of the state’s strict ratio rules, San Diego Unified has needed to drastically increase staff at PrimeTime sites. Those rules require one ELOP staffer for every 10 transitional kindergarten or kindergarten students, and one for every 20 students in later grades.
Another bit of fine print here – San Diego Unified doesn’t technically employ PrimeTime staff. Instead, they’re employed by one of the district’s more than half a dozen private partners like the YMCA and SAY San Diego.
Prior to the change, those contractors employed about 1,000 people who worked at the district’s PrimeTime sites. To fully staff this new expanded program, district officials are looking to hire an additional 500 over the next year, and they’re moving fast. Since July, their contractors have added about 200 staff members.
Since the district started staffing up in mid-July, they’ve been able to increase enrollment in its after-school program from 13,763 to 16,393 – a 19 percent increase in just two months.
Tobie Pace, the district’s senior director of Extended Learning Opportunities, said in the past, the PrimeTime staff has mostly consisted of younger people, college students for example. With this new push, district officials are now actively recruiting more organizations to become official PrimeTime partners.
“It’s really shifting them over to following ELOP guidelines, creating these structured programs that have quality enrichment and are not just quote, unquote, babysitting. So it’s been very strategic,” Pace said.
But it’s not so simple to just onboard everyone. The state, and the district, each have a whole series of criteria staff must meet, like background checks and a half dozen trainings.
“There is a rigorous process. That’s why it doesn’t just happen overnight,” Pace said. “But I will say, it has definitely been rewarding, because we’re able to offer jobs to this younger generation and say ‘Instead of working at McDonald’s, come on over after you’re done with your college classes in the morning and work with our students and pour back into our community.”
The new influx of state funding also came with some significant strings attached.
It required districts who took the additional money to begin to offer free programs to all students. Previously, they were only required to offer it to English learners or low-income families. So, even as San Diego Unified has enrolled thousands of new students in PrimeTime, thousands more have joined the program’s ever-growing waitlist.
In June 2023, the district’s waitlist for PrimeTime had about 1,921 students. Now, that waitlist has more than doubled, increasing to about 5,389.
Hazan, who has long pledged to clear the district’s at times massive waitlist for after-school care, thinks it’s possible even given the new challenge of providing care to a drastically increased pool of families.
The impact of free, universal after-school care could be nothing short of transformative, she said.
She’s also landed on a phrase to describe what she thinks the responsibility of policymakers should be: aligning the school day with the typical workday.
It’s a simple concept. The typical school day starts around 8:00 a.m. and ends closer to 3:00 p.m. Thanks to weekly professional development hours at San Diego Unified, though, once a week school ends as much as two hours earlier. The specifics of bell schedules vary across the district. Meanwhile parents work traditional nine-to-five jobs, the hours of which throw a significant monkey wrench into their ability to pick them up or drop them off.
That schedule is a reflection of norms that were created in the 1950s, Hazan said, when many children came from single-earner households whose mothers were able to stay home to care for children after school.
“That’s no longer a reasonable expectation,” Hazan said. “We need to be able to provide care for children for the same number of hours a day as we expect their parents to be working.”
Leave a comment