The mission of the Overtown Youth Center is to inspire and empower youth and families by fostering hope through enrichment services.
Our vision is to inspire, empower and enrich the lives of our students.
Our goal is to be an integral part of the community by delivering enrichment services that foster hope and promote life-long learning and success for our inner-city youth and citizens. Our goal is to help build a child who is resilient. A resilient child is a child who can live in an environment that is loaded with risk factors, including drugs and crime/violence, a chance at growing into a competent and productive member of society.
Description
OYC programs are designed to engage children in educational and recreational activities that promote their physical, cognitive, motor, social, and emotional development. After-school services are provided both at our site and within our partner schools and are coordinated closely with in-school services. During the after school hours, students attend daily educational enrichment classes focused on homework assistance, skill building, FCAT preparation, and remediation. Students participate in daily recreational activities that include culturally diverse forms of physical exercise and creative arts. We also offer a range of preventive and character-building activities designed to empower children to identify and avoid negative influences and to pursue positive ones.
The OYC Standards are a set of values based on peaceful co-existence with others. For a social program to truly be successful in this day and age we must instill a set of standards or values in the students we are responsible for. By establishing and adhering to the standards we have establish a set of expectations for our students. Students normally live-up to (or down to) the expectations we (significant adults) have established for them. We do not claim perfect adherence to the OYC Standards, but we do claim progress. The word progress is important because learning and practicing the OYC Standards is a progressive process. It is our expectation (and hope) that all students learn to say the OYC Standards flawlessly during their elementary school. You will see from our outline we have exercises designed to help students understand each standards root meaning. During middle school, students should be able to express the OYC Standards in abstract terms. Middle school students should understand the "preamble" to the OYC Standards and it's meaning as well. By the time a student reaches high school, students should begin to see and express how the OYC Standards impact their lives.
