Saturday morning is a time when many youngsters watch cartoons and clean their rooms-unless they happen to be going to college.
College for kids, it’s called. A growing number of Chicago-area schoolchildren are extending their school week by attending classes at community colleges on Saturday mornings.
But instead of participating in traditional sports, dance or arts-and-crafts-type classes, today’s children are studying such weighty topics as archeology, astronomy, Japanese, computers and French.
“I take classes for fun,” said 9-year-old Meghan O’Connor of Skokie, who is enrolled in Oakton Community College’s Saturday morning Kid’s College.
She also loves learning. So Meghan, a 4th-grader at Highland School in Skokie, attends algebra and French classes at the college’s Des Plaines campus.
“My mom speaks French, and she thought it would be neat if we could speak to each other. I thought it would be a good idea too,” Meghan said. “And I like math. The algebra class is really fun.”
Children’s programming at community colleges isn’t new, officials said. Some colleges have offered programs for children since the 1970s. But demand for these classes has been growing.
College of Lake County in Grayslake had children’s programs for three years preceding 1991-92, when the programs were disbanded for lack of an administrator. Then Anita Mitchell was hired as coordinator of the Community Education Department in December 1991.
“My first day on the job I was getting calls from kids, teachers-everyone connected with” children’s programs, Mitchell said. “They had thought it was wonderful.”
Whereas some community colleges once targeted academically gifted children for such classes, today they strive to reach children of all ability levels.
“So many of the extracurricular educational activities have been geared toward gifted students, we didn’t want to limit (our program) to just that,” said Julie Sanger, who coordinates the community-education program at Triton College in River Grove.
At Triton, for instance, more than 2,000 children age 6 to 13 are enrolled in its Triton Junior’s classes such as physics, chemistry and earth science in addition to lighter fare such as crocheting and cartooning.
The College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn also enrolls about 2,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, said Patricia Caldwell, manager of community education. Kids on Campus is for children in kindergarten through 5th grade; Teens on Campus is for older students. Up to 90 enrichment classes are offered each quarter.
“We began as a summer program, but it has steadily grown so that now we have a year-round program,” Caldwell said.
Many of the classes are taught by the school’s faculty, and college facilities and equipment are used as much as possible. The class format takes a lively approach that requires active participation from the students.
“The learning is a hands-on, learn-by-doing experience,” said Liz Burke, coordinator of the Oakton program. “That’s our emphasis. Every couple of sessions, the kids go home with something they’ve made, or they get an experience of some sort.”
Oakton’s program has about 400 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Children in kindergarten through 6th grade who enroll in Oakton’s archeology classes, for instance, have a chance to work on an archeological site on the campus. They learn how to divide the site into numbered sections and mark off where an artifact is found and how deeply buried it is.
In another class, students hone their math skills in the college gymnasium. “These are kids who are not eager math learners-ones who need more motivation,” Burke said. “So they go to the gym and play basketball and then compute their own box score averages. They’re learning percentages and decimals, but in a much more active way.”
At the College of Lake County in Grayslake, about 100 junior high students in the college’s “Explore!” program sample a smorgasbord of experiences.
“Swashbuckling” introduces them to the art of fencing. In “Who Done It?” mock crime scenes are set up and students take fingerprints, make plaster casts of evidence and solve the crimes; it is taught by an instructor in the college’s criminal justice department.
“This exposes young people to areas they possibly didn’t know existed before,” said Anita Mitchell, coordinator of the children’s program at the college. “It also exposes them to college and the kinds of things that are available here.”
Parents, too, see advantages in enrolling their children in enrichment classes, and area college officials say that growth in their children’s programs is a result of parental demand.
“Part of what we (offer) is in response to trends we see in the marketplace,” Oakton’s Burke said.
Parents also request art classes such as watercolor, sketching and cartooning, Burke said.
An archeology class now offered for kindergarten through 4th grade is also a response to market demand, Burke said. “We thought archeology for this age group would be too difficult, but parents said they wanted it.” The request came after the “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” ran on television last year.
At Elgin Community College, foreign-language classes have been added because of parental demand.
“Parents are interested in having their children learn another language,” said Joan Arnal, a coordinator for the community education department.
Having the classes on campus gives the schools a marketing tool, officials said.
“We use professional materials in the art classes, the college chemistry labs for the teens and the grounds for the physical education courses, so students have a chance to sample college life,” said Caldwell of the College of Du Page.
“Our program gets children into visiting various parts of the campus, inside and out,” Burke said. “We’re not the first to offer children’s classes, but we saw this was an important trend. We had something for adults and senior citizens, but nothing for kids.”
When presented in the right spirit, these classes don’t steal precious free time from children and hurry them through childhood, educators said.
“If the focus were heavily academic or competitive, or viewed by parents as a way to accelerate their children, then that would be a terrible way to run the program,” Caldwell said. “But this is a way for kids to explore new ideas and dabble in an experience with some supervision.”
The college’s woodworking class for kindergartners and 1st graders, which began in the fall, is “a chance for little people to come in and make projects with real tools,” Caldwell said.
Elyse Rasky-O’Connor, Meghan’s mother, praises the Oakton classes.
“I think it’s great,” she said. “The teachers are top quality. They really know how to relate to children on a level that keeps children interested and teaches them something.”
Where else, she asked, could her daughter have seen the inside of a starfish?
“It was really cool,” Meghan said of the starfish dissection class she took last summer.
College officials also say that because the classes are not graded, students can take them for fun without pressure.
“It’s a very liberating experience-an opportunity for kids to try out some things in a nonjudgmental way,” Caldwell said. “There’s no right or wrong way of doing things, so the pressure is off.”
Rasky-O’Conner believes that the enrichment classes offer programs that many school systems are not able to provide. “The issue is we have to do something to keep our children interested in learning,” she said.
Meghan, however, is less philosophical about why she takes classes on Saturday mornings.
“I don’t like watching cartoons,” she said.
