Equity, Joy, and the Courage to Challenge the Status Quo (Guest Post)

My friend Maya Deshpande is a product leader on the sustainability team at Mattel and a passionate about the future of public education in California. A proud product of California’s education system, Maya’s experiences continue to shape her belief in equitable access, joyful learning, and systems that serve the whole child. She writes at deshdog.substack.com.

How an after school program in Oakland is quietly rewriting the rules of public education using California's ELO-P grant

Chen Kong-Wick lives by three principles that rarely make it into policy memos or budget proposals: equity, joy, and the courage to challenge the status quo. These values have been her guiding compass in building YES! Sports—a program that not only gets kids moving, but upends how we think about the role of after school hours in public education.

YES! Sports began as a scrappy experiment. In early 2022, Chen discovered the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELO-P), a state investment that had just become available to districts across California. With it, she did something school administrators rarely have the courage to do. She dared to dream bigger than the system allowed— and built the infrastructure to support it. YES! Sports would not fit into the mold of conventional after school offerings. Rather, the program completely reimagined what youth development could look like if equity and joy were at the center. That meant confronting the realities of a fractured youth development field: heavy compliance, limited infrastructure, and little room for innovation. The dream was big and came with serious operational challenges.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, only 14% of youth in Oakland were getting the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity. That’s 23% below the national average. An after school sports program would certainly support students’ physical health, a foundation for stronger academic performance, higher attendance, and improved mental well-being. But existing programs fall short. Standard offerings involve rigid schedules, limited transportation, and low-quality food. These programs do their best to provide students with exercise while being squeezed into leftover time after the final bell, managed with patchwork staffing, and funded with temporary dollars. Perhaps their greatest pitfall, a result of their general lack of resourcing, is that they often fail to do the work of building stronger, more connected school communities. Meanwhile, private sports leagues, where the quality, consistency, and community spirit are often stronger, are out of reach for many Oakland families. Formal leagues are pay-to-play, making participation largely dependent on families’ financial resources. For those without flexible work hours, reliable transit, or disposable income, the barriers stack quickly. The result is a deep inequity: the students who would benefit most from after school sports, those facing structural barriers across the board, are often the ones excluded from playing team sports and absorbing all the benefits that come with.

So Chen’s team did something radical: they built a sports program from scratch that didn’t accommodate the existing system, and instead challenged its very design.

“It’s like we were building the plane while flying it.”

Dreaming big is one thing; delivering on that dream within a system not built to support it is another. The after school landscape is riddled with logistical headaches: compliance paperwork, staffing gaps, disconnected data systems, and grant dollars that are hard to translate into high-quality programming. Chen and her team weren’t just building a sports program; they were navigating a broken infrastructure.

From its inception, YES! Sports pushed the boundaries of the district’s capacity for after school enrichment. When the California Department of Education couldn’t support Saturday programs, Chen and her team partnered with local youth sports providers to operate for nine hours on the weekend. When processed government snacks went untouched by kids, they turned to Eat.Learn.Play. for hot meals until ELO-P funding could be used to cover costs directly. When district food services wouldn’t feed staff and parents, they rerouted funding through a community partner to bring in food trucks. The program became evidence of a simple premise: if after school is an ecosystem wherein students learn, grow, build identity, and find belonging, then it should be treated with the same intentionality, investment, and care as the school day itself.

Slowly, something happened. Students showed up—not just to exercise, but to connect. Their families stuck around too. Soon enough, the program grew to shuttle kids to college campuses and play with student athletes. They could see themselves in older kids who shared the same love of sport. Coaches and teachers started communicating. School attendance improved. Some families who were considering moving to charter schools chose to stay at their public schools so they could remain in the program.

We talk a lot about systems change in public education but more often than not, those ideas remain in theory, not lived in practice. What YES! Sports offers is a grounded, replicable model for what it means to build new systems—ones that prioritize access, relationships, and belonging. It doesn’t treat after school as an afterthought. It demonstrates that what happens between our students, families, educators, and administrators outside of regular school hours can be transformational.

Here’s the twist: the funding that made YES! Sports possible—the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELO-P) grant—is available across California. But many districts still fail to leverage it. How can we prevent this from happening? How can we ensure that after school isn’t seen as a nice-to-have, but as a key component of modern education?

To do that, teams like Chen’s need tools that bridge the gap between dollars and delivery. In search of anything that could help her team manage the logistical chaos of building a community-rooted, equity-first program, she found a partner in Attendly. At its core, Attendly is more than a tool for managing after school programs— it provides a framework for scaling them. By streamlining attendance tracking, program safety and compliance, impact monitoring, and logistics coordination, Attendly transforms ambitious programs like YES! Sports into sustainable systems. By optimizing YES! Sports program operations, Chen leveraged Attendly to give her team time to focus on what matters most: relationships, access, and belonging.

The success of YES! Sports reminds us that system change doesn’t have to start with a district-wide initiative or a state mandate. It can begin with one team, one neighborhood, one bold belief that public schools should be places where all students can grow in all directions. If we want to build an education system fit for the future, we have to invest in what happens after the bell rings. The tools matter. But the courage to dream—and to build mid-flight—is what gets us off the ground.

For more information about YES! Sports, visit: www.ousd.org/yessports or email at yessports@ousd.org.

Attendly streamlines after school operations by automating administrative tasks, freeing educators to focus on meaningful student engagement. We understand that the real promise of after school programs lies not in the hours they fill, but in the system changes they make possible.