Last school year, we were very excited to introduce Texas Afterschool Centers on Education, also known as the ACE 21st Century Program, which provides educational and enrichment activities for our students at no cost! It is a federally funded program that provides homework help, tutoring, sports activities, music and arts based clubs, and so much more. It offers our students a safe, fun learning environment afterschool for one hour of education and one hour of enrichment activities and is even available to our students in the summer! In just one year alone, the program has grown exponentially and our campus sites are operating over the required student numbers. Some campuses started at about 30 students and the site coordinators have been dedicated to recruiting students and bringing that number up at their campus throughout the year. The ACE Program believes it is vital to get the students’ opinions, so they take student surveys to determine what new activities students think would be interesting and fun to have at their campus. Mr. Jack Garcia, ACE Director expressed, “these surveys really were taken into consideration this year. We looked over them and we wanted to incorporate a little of something that each age group was interested in. This includes our flag football and volleyball teams for the elementary schools.” This semester, ACE was excited to introduce flag football for their elementary students, which has been a blast for so many of us, including the community members. While there are a number of enrichment activities that our students can participate in, this year, the ACE Department wanted to take a step back and see how they could advance the educational aspect of the program. So, they have introduced the Dental Assistant Program for the students at La Feria Early College High School. This gives our students real world, hands-on experience where they are partnering with White Wing Dental in La Feria, Texas. At our elementary campuses, they really focus on stations in the classroom. This divides the students into equally sized, smaller groups, “...it addresses the academic needs of the students as they rotate through the centers. They are currently working with an online program called Legends of Learning, a STEM game-based learning program proven to raise test scores. We plan to implement another learning program, Reading A-Z, to help our students with their ELAR needs. This will be more hands-on where the teacher can sit in smaller groups and work on different needs for that specific student,” Mrs. Nereida Garcia, ACE Specialist, explained. While she is new to the ACE family, she fits right in and her excitement for the school year is invigorating! Both program leaders agreed on this, “we want to help improve their academics, that they attend school and we can help cut down on any behavior issues.” As the year progresses, the ACE 21st Century Program plans to introduce more exciting opportunities for the La Feria ISD students… but you’ll just have to wait and see.