Everything I Needed in Life I Got in Afterschool
A conversation with Paul Morin on why the hours after the bell matter for learning, confidence, and Alabama's future
When Paul Morin sat down with Colby, he didn't tell him what to say.
Paul had been asked to bring a student to Washington, D.C., for an Afterschool Caucus event, to help members of Congress understand the impact of Afterschool and summer learning programs. He and a program director in north Alabama selected Colby, a student in a local STEM program serving grades K–12. Before committing to the trip, sponsored by the national Afterschool Alliance, Paul wanted to hear Colby's story for himself, with no script and no coaching.
Colby was a senior nearing graduation. Like so many students across Alabama, Colby lived in a very rural, disadvantaged area with limited opportunities. Paul asked how school was going. “I guess I'm doing all right,” Colby said. “I'm about to graduate, so I think I've done OK.” He didn't say he loved it. “Just something you've gotta do to move on with life,” he said.
Then Paul asked about Afterschool, and Colby lit up. “Do you know when a wife gives a husband a honey-do list?” he asked. Every few weeks, the instructors of his Afterschool program rotated students through a new set of hands-on activities, centered around practical real-world applications, the Career Clusters, and workforce readiness. “We've been doing our honey-do list,” Colby said, “so I've been learning new and different things every few weeks.” Somewhere in that rotation, he'd discovered electrical work. He'd already earned an electrician scholarship and was headed to community college that fall.
“It's because of what I learned in Afterschool,” he told Paul. Then Paul asked him to compare the two. “What's the difference between in-school and out-of-school?” Colby didn't hesitate: “I found what I love and will need in life in Afterschool.”
“Now what do you want me to tell them people?” Colby asked.
Paul burst out laughing. “What you just said,” he answered.
The Hours After the Bell Are Not Extra
Paul has spent close to two decades making that case professionally: as Alabama's statewide Afterschool coordinator, working with the ALSDE's 21st CCLC programs, serving the Alabama Community Education Association (ACEA), and now as the ALDHR program coordinator for Expanding Learning Possibilities (ELP), a collaborative venture of the Alabama Department of Human Resources (ALDHR) and the Children's Trust Fund. He also serves as a member of the Governor's STEM Advisory Council. Before any of that, he was a teacher, a principal, and an administrator, nationally and abroad.
One idea has stayed fixed in his mind through all of it. “There's no such thing as extracurricular,” Paul said. “It should be co-curricular, because a child's brain does not turn off. They're always learning.” He traces that back to something he learned while earning his master's in curriculum, instruction, and design: “Everything that touches a child's life is curriculum.” A retired superintendent put it to him even more plainly over lunch one day: “Paul, you know that school should look like Afterschool.” He wholeheartedly agrees.
It isn't a small gap he's talking about, either. “When the bell rings,” Paul said, “there are over 23 million children with no place to be.” The Afterschool Alliance's America After 3PM survey has found that roughly three in four children whose families want them in an Afterschool program still can't get a spot. “The school day is not enough anymore,” Paul said. “Well, actually, it never was. Children and families need infrastructural support, even more so in today's world.”
What Twenty-First-Century Learning Actually Looks Like
The phrase “21st-century learning” gets used so often it can start to mean nothing. Paul is quick to say it isn't about devices or platforms. It's about whether students are doing the thinking.
He tells a story about touring an early childhood classroom with the former secretary of early childhood, watching a four-year-old build a rocket out of blocks. “Just ask them what they're doing,” the secretary told him. “They're natural-born engineers.” Then she added the line that has stuck with Paul ever since: “And then we take them, and we bring them into the classroom, and we sit them down in these little rows, in these little desks, and we proceed to kill that passion.”
Paul comes back to that word, engineer, often. “Anytime you find a solution for something, and you think it through, and you come up with an answer in order to make it work, you're engineering,” he said. “That's what an engineer does. They find real-world answers to real-world problems.” Demystifying that word for kids, he says, is half the job.
It's also why “the secret sauce is not rescuing the kids,” as Paul put it. “Allowing them to struggle and fail—that's been a huge paradigm shift for the teachers.” It runs against instinct. An adult who cares about a child wants to fix the thing that isn't working. But letting a student sit inside a problem long enough to solve it on their own is where the real learning happens, a point CAMP has written about before: productive struggle isn't a nice-to-have, it's the work itself.
Inside AVI and Team TALL
That philosophy is what Paul has helped build into the Alabama Virtual Institute (AVI) and Team TALL, the programs ELP works alongside in partnership with the Alabama Department of Human Resources and the Talladega County School System. “We have two rules,” he said. “Number one, love them. Number two, have fun. Because neuroscience proves that when a child is engaged and having fun, they're going to learn. What a radical concept.”
The model is intentionally hybrid. Certified teachers and STEM specialists lead the curriculum itself, joining live over Zoom into Afterschool sites across the state, with the understanding and expectation that programmatic staff on the ground be just as participatory as the students and virtual instructors. They keep the room running, build relationships with the kids, and work through the hands-on portions of each lesson alongside them. “We've removed the pressure from the programmatic staff to feel like they have to be the content experts at all times in that room,” Paul said. The subject-matter expertise comes through the screen; showing up for the kids is the staff's job, and it's no less essential to how the initiative works.
Every site is still expected to fully buy in, not just host the curriculum. Paul doesn't apologize for that. He's watched long enough to know these programs typically run with more families wanting in than there are seats. The sites already lined up and waiting don't need convincing.
That responsiveness showed up last fall in a concrete way. Alabama's new FOCUS Act, restricting phones in schools, was about to take effect, and Paul knew it would upend the routines both programs had already planned. “I threw a monkey wrench into everything,” he said. “Team TALL and AVI had already made their fall plans, and I said, I'm so sorry, but I think we need to do this instead.” He pulled in two resources, Kids' Brains & Screens and Safe and Sound, developed by a grantee of the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, both of which are built around how technology affects the developing brain. Then, rather than send another handout home in a backpack, he flipped it. “Let the children be the superstars,” he said. Students led parent-family nights themselves, explaining to their own parents what they'd learned. “The kids loved it,” Paul said. “They needed it, and they still need it.”
When the Walls Come Down
Paul is careful to say the value of Afterschool isn't only academic. It's relational, in a way the school day doesn't always have the time to afford.
Kids are building something, talking, laughing, working beside an adult who isn't grading them. “When they're engaged in those projects, those walls come tumbling down,” Paul said. “As they come tumbling down, you begin to see, and you have the ability to reach their heart.” He tells of one student who used her project journal, meant to capture scientific thinking, to write down something that told the adults in the room she needed help right away. Because someone was paying close enough attention to notice, they could act on it immediately.
As Paul puts it, simply: “Every kid needs somebody in their corner that believes in them.”
Real-World Partners, Real-World Learning
Madison County, where Colby found his footing, is also home to Redstone Arsenal, one of the region's largest employers and a hub for Army missile programs, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and aerospace and defense contractors. “A lot of people don't know what goes on up there,” Paul said.
Years ago, he wrote Boeing a letter of intent asking for $25,000 to support a STEM Afterschool site in that county. The company called him back the next day. “All I want to do is fund a little Afterschool program,” Paul told them. Over the following two and a half years, Boeing invested more than a quarter of a million dollars, funding activities and equipment students used to build an environment of STEM learning. What Paul remembers most isn't the dollar figure. It's watching kids sprint from school to get to Afterschool, and swallow their snack whole because they couldn't wait to get back to what they'd been creating. “It was one of the highlights of my career,” he said.
That's the thinking behind how Paul talks about ambition, too. “Most of our children do not know what's in their own backyard,” he said, meaning the range of careers and industries sitting inside their own state. A student who says she wants to be an astronaut probably won't become one; that's “like putting a thread through the eye of a needle,” as Paul puts it. But the interest doesn't have to be wasted. It might land her in aerospace engineering or advanced manufacturing instead, fields Madison County has no shortage of. “You don't know whether you have a Picasso or a Satchmo in front of you,” he said.
The Boeing partnership also opened a door to Congress, where Colby told his story to a room that included a longtime Alabama congresswoman. What Paul didn't know until that meeting was that Colby's mother had raised four children largely on her own after she lost her husband to mental health issues. Without the Afterschool program, she told the room, she'd have had nowhere to put her kids while she went back to school. She's a med tech now. The congresswoman was moved to tears.
It's Not in Vain
Paul is glad when the numbers hold up, and he doesn't undersell them. Last year, he said, every one of the program's sites posted double-digit gains in both reading and math. Those are the kind of results a funder or a school partner can put in a report. But ask Paul what he actually wants a child to leave with, and the answer isn't a test score.
“You're building into them character, resilience, fortitude,” he said. The goal is a kid who runs into something hard and decides: this is not going to beat me, I'm going to find out how to make this work. That instinct doesn't stay in the Afterschool room. It shows up in the school day, in a first job, in the parts of adult life nobody can fully prepare you for.
Ask Paul what he'd want the next generation of Afterschool leaders to remember, and he doesn't need to think long. Educators rarely get to see the full harvest of what they plant. That's part of why burnout is so real in this field. But he's certain of one thing: “It's not in vain.”
Colby is proof of that. A direction, a scholarship, and adults who thought his story was worth carrying all the way to Washington: that's what he found in Afterschool. Paul put the whole case for this work more simply than any report could: “The only thing that's going to stand the test of time is what you invest in the life of someone else. Who better to invest your life into than a child?”
With thanks to: Paul A. Morin, M.Ed., Educational/Training Specialist, ALDHR Program Coordinator, and member of the Governor's STEM Advisory Council, for sharing his time, memories, and perspective.
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