What District Leaders Should Actually Ask Before Signing an Afterschool Contract

I Have Been on Both Sides of This Table

I have sat in group vendor evaluation meetings. I have sat in individual vendor meetings. I have been in rooms where district administrators walk through an afterschool program site to see what is actually happening. And I have been on the other side, pitching Student Hires to district leadership, presenting full program plans from start to finish.

I have also been pitched to. As a teacher, vendors would present their products and services, and from that perspective, it always felt like another thing being added to an already crowded curriculum. Another tool. Another login. Another set of materials that someone else thought would be useful.

That experience shaped how we approach it at Student Hires. We try to make it seamless. We provide full implementation. Schools provide the space. That is the arrangement. We do not hand teachers a binder and wish them luck.

I have also been in rooms where the conversation gets uncomfortable. I have watched vendors who are failing to provide adequate staff for the number of programs they are servicing. Districts keep giving them opportunities, keep paying them, despite gaps in programming and a lack of quality services. Meanwhile, other providers who actually have the staff and the capacity to deliver are sitting on the outside, unable to get in.

That dynamic is more common than people realize.

The Accountability Gap Nobody Addresses

Districts ask the right questions. Most of the time, the questions are solid. Do you have a substitute plan? What is your staff-to-student ratio? How do you handle emergencies?

The problem is not the questions. The problem is that nobody enforces the answers.

A provider may say they have a substitute plan in place. But when they are servicing too many schools and a staff member calls out at 2:00 PM, they often cannot actually fill that spot. The plan exists on paper. The execution falls apart in practice. And because there is no real accountability mechanism built into most contracts, the provider keeps operating with gaps that students and families absorb.

This is the part that frustrates me most about the afterschool vendor landscape. It is not that people are lying in proposals. It is that the system does not check whether the promises are being kept.

The Commute Problem Is Real

I personally have commuted over an hour consistently to be at an afterschool program site. I have had staff members do the same, depending on the program location. I am not going to pretend this is always avoidable.

What matters is how you handle it. The staff members who made those long commutes were committed and compensated well enough to make it work. We provided gas cards and similar benefits to help subsidize their fuel and travel time. Those programs were successful.

In the event that a staff member had to miss due to the commute or anything else, we had backup staff available to step in quickly. That backup capacity is the difference between a program that runs consistently and one that cancels sessions every time someone has car trouble.

Not every provider builds in that redundancy. Ask about it before you sign.

When Districts Get Locked In

Districts get locked into bad contracts because most afterschool programs are structured as year-long agreements with no backup options in place. When performance drops or quality slips, schools may complain, but they are forced to stay with the provider because the decision was made at the district level.

What that looks like on the ground: administrators are unhappy. Families are unhappy. Students are unhappy. But everyone has to deal with it until the contract period ends.

I have seen this happen. And I have also been on the losing end of the opposite problem. After one of our most successful year-long programs, we lost a contract through the RFP process. Parents organized, wrote letters, and called school district officials asking to keep Student Hires at the school. But because our written RFP response was scored as inadequate by evaluators, we were not granted the project for the next year.

The program worked. The families wanted it. The students were engaged. None of that mattered in the evaluation.

That taught me something important about the RFP process: it measures proposal writing, not program quality. And families are the ones who bear the burden when those two things do not align.

The Honest Case for Local and National Vendors

I run a local vendor organization. I am not going to pretend we do not have weaknesses.

Local vendors like Student Hires may not have the full capacity or institutional experience of a large national provider. In our organization, we do not have a large roster of full-time staff building the core operational pieces needed to support the organization as we scale. That is a real limitation. We are working on it, but it is honest to say that scaling a local operation is hard.

National organizations have a lot of the operational framework already established. They have long histories of partnerships with supporting organizations. They often have significant funding from nonprofit foundations. Those are real advantages.

But the trade-off is equally real. That established framework is often a cookie-cutter approach. National vendors have systems that work across many districts, which means those systems are not built for any specific district. Individualization falls through the cracks. The curriculum is the same in San Bernardino as it is in Sacramento. The staffing model does not account for what makes your school community different from one 200 miles away.

My honest recommendation: evaluate based on what your specific schools need, not on which vendor has the biggest name.

What to Actually Ask and Enforce

Before you sign any afterschool contract, ask these questions. But more importantly, build enforcement into your agreement:

What is your staff retention rate? Ask for the number, and add a reporting requirement to the contract so you can track it.
How many of your staff live within a reasonable distance of the school site? And what is your plan when someone cannot make it?
Can you provide a reference from a school where the contract ended? Every provider loses contracts. What matters is why and how they handled it.
What does your training look like before staff enter a classroom? How many hours? Where does it happen?
What ongoing support do staff receive in their first 90 days?
Can I review the full curriculum before signing?
What is the notice period for non-renewal?
What data will you report, how often, and what happens if the data shows problems?
Will you run a pilot at one school before committing to a full contract?
What happens when a staff member does not show up?

The last one is the most important. Every vendor has a plan for when things go right. The vendors worth working with have a plan for when things go wrong.

If you want to see how Student Hires answers each of these, email me directly: hello@manuelzavala.com. I will send you our answers with the real numbers.