Cutting Corners: Seven Years at "Extended Day"

I don’t remember how or why I ended up at an after school program called “Extended Day”, but what I do know is that it generated some of the most interesting afternoons of my young life. Children from Kindergarten to Seventh grade were taken to the Peter Toomey Center behind the old high school to spend their afternoons playing games and eating junk food.

One of my earliest memories of ED is standing in line. After school, children were bused from the district schools to Florence Roache Elementary School. There, you stood in line. Younger children stood on the right side of the hallway, while children from third grade and up stood on the left. The teachers walked up and down the line until attendance was taken, which sometimes took half an hour. It is in this line that I learned hand games. Endless sessions of “Miss Mary Mack” were played (and later perfected on the bus rides to school) until the one lost child was located and the line began to move. In an endless herd, children barely potty trained walked past the middle school and high school to the building that would house them for the next two hours (or until their parents picked them up).

Once backpacks were stored in lockers, snack time began. Another line formed, and at the end was a small milk crate of junk food. Fruit Roll-Ups, Cheetos, Sunchips, and Goldfish were accompanied by Sunny Delight (before the name was changed to Sunny-D) and Hawaiian Punch. After snack time, playtime began. There were books, dolls, and board games to keep us busy, but most of the toys were broken or lost. The best one could do was to claim your territory and spend the rest of your time protecting it. Alliances were formed. Exclusive clicks of girls coveted the few intact Barbies, while boys horse played around the deeply sagging donated couches. The “teachers” wondered around the room breaking up fights and sometimes joining in games.

One thing no one in the “Little Kids Room” looked forward to were half days. Any other child whose parent worked at home would spend a leisurely afternoon watching TV, but at ED we went to the playground behind the library. After eating lunch (brought by us, of course), we would line up once again and walk nearly two miles to the library. There we would swing, run, and play to our hearts desire. Unless, of course, that was not your favorite thing to do. I mostly sat alone, not bothering to fight for a swing and thought. Of course, my mind was young and so my thoughts were mostly about ponies and songs. When it was time to leave, we formed a line once again and walked the two miles back. Often on the way we would buy popsicles at the local grocery store, and then look for the shadiest place to sit.

On regular days, the playground was even less enjoyable. The playground at the Peter Toomey Center was a jumble of miss-matched metal structures. The swings were highly sought after and sometimes fought over with almost ferocious fervor. There was a slide, but it was rusting and covered in a sort of phosphorescent glue left by some distant graduate of the program. There were also little ride-on ponies. Basically a metal horse on a giant spring. These provided as substitute for the girls who weren’t fast enough to secure a space on the swings. However, the springs were often home to a large colony of bees, so the girls just sat and talked. I, however, sat in the dirt. Be it playing in the “sand box” (of course, sand covered half of the playground, so the box was just four pieces of wood atop the sand, and not used for actual containing of the dirt), or I simply contented myself with digging for clay. Shovels were hard to come by, since they were either broken beyond use or being used by the boys who built sand castles. Instead, I used sticks and rocks. Keeping the lumps of clay in an empty Sunny Delight bottle and damp paper towel in my locker, I planned to make something useful like a bowl. However, this clay was dry and gritty, hardly good for anything. In the end, I had to give up digging in the sand.

Once I graduated into the third grade, I also moved down to the other end of the hall to the “Big Kid’s Room”. Here, there was more freedom. We were given two snacks daily (while in the other room we were given two snacks only on special and rare occasions), and we did not have to make the trek to the library every half day. There were also computers to play on, as well as a foosball table and a wider assortment of craft supplies. Since I was not very good at making friends, I sat with the teachers most of the time, playing card games while they talked about recipes and what their children were doing. However, there was also the “quiet rooms”. These were small offices, converted into plain rooms with maybe a table or a broken couch to sit on. They were intended for children who did not want to be bothered while doing their homework, but more served as a safe haven away from teachers. You could say mostly anything, so long as you weren’t too loud.

Occasionally, they would open up the gym, which was a vast open room much like a standard gymnasium, only there was a giant grey elephant painted onto the floor of the center court. You could simply chase a basketball around, or run at full speed to release extra energy. This was of little interest to me, so I mostly kept to playing cards or board games with the teachers.

With the coming of sixth grade, came another move into another room. This was smaller, about ten feet down the hall from the Big Kid’s Room, and was home base to about twenty kids from sixth grade to eighth grade. We had the most freedom. We could roam the halls, go into the gym, eat snack whenever we wanted, and have full access to the quiet rooms. I would often go into the room a girl named Meghan, and we would practice our most colorful interjections. We attempted our homework, but we often just told stories and ate the food that was provided to us. When Meghan was not there, I would mostly read in the front hall and try to avoid the boys who were louder and ruder than any boys I had yet encountered.

At Christmas in seventh grade, I was given a house key. That meant that I no longer had to wait upwards of four hours to be picked up by my mother. In the past years, I had begun to notice that the building had fallen into disrepair. The toilets often clogged (instead of a handle, one had a hole in the wall that you had to reach into and push a button in order to flush), and the stalls were covered in an ugly chipped coat of yellow paint. The Sunchips were often expired (although still edible), and even less people of my age seemed to be coming. The teachers who had known us for years were sad to see us go, but my sister and I couldn’t wait to leave.

I don’t blame my parents for sending my there. My mother worked an hour away, and my sister and I were too young to stay home alone. In fact, it also made me a little tougher. None of my other friends had to run to secure ten minutes on a rusting swing, or eat stale chips day in and day out. There, forced to interact with other children my age, I learned to be self sustaining. Either you made up your own way of entertainment, or you were bored out of your mind. Making up games, reading, or just trying to shoot baskets in the gym was the best way to survive. I am so glad I don’t have to go there anymore!