Like many moms with children in middle and high school, I can remember when recess and gym class were an everyday part of kids’ lives. I grew up with daily games of kickball, ultimate Frisbee or volleyball, laps around an asphalt track ringing a football field and gym clothes crammed into a locker for days at a time! But over the past couple of decades, most of that’s changed. Physical education classes — the once ubiquitous PE — have been disappearing from the nation’s schools, a victim of budget-cutting and standardized-test mania.

During the summer months, many children get a fair amount of exercise — either at summer camp or a summer learning program, playing pickup games or just running around with their friends. But with school back in session, such outlets dwindle, and many are left without the structured opportunities for exercise they need to learn and ingrain the habits of health.

Children who participate in quality afterschool programs are an exception — and a big exception at that, because more than 10 million children are in afterschool across the nation. Programs vary from community to community and site to site, but in addition to all kinds of academic support, they typically offer various forms of exercise that range from team or individual sports to just plain running around playing — always under the watchful eye of a caring adult.

In fact, more than 2,700 YMCA afterschool programs — 90 percent of Y programs — are following Healthy Eating and Physical Activity (HEPA) standards developed by experts at the Y, the National Institute on Out-of-School Time, the University of Massachusetts College of Nursing and Health Sciences, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The standards call on programs to provide a minimum number of minutes of physical activity every day for all children, as well as healthy snacks and meals that include fruits or vegetables, whole grains, and no trans-fat or fried foods. Moreover, the standards call on the Ys to reach out to parents and caregivers to form a united, healthy front. The Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the National Recreation and Park Association also made national commitments to implement the HEPA standards – ensuring thousands more children will have healthy options after the school bell rings.

Unfortunately, not all children have an afterschool program available to them. In fact, for every child who participates in afterschool, the parents of two more — almost 20 million — say they’d enroll their child, if a program were available. That, of course, is the rub: Programs simply aren’t available. The reason boils down to something just as straightforward: So far, we haven’t been willing to invest in the afterschool and summer learning programs our children need.

Congress is facing an important set of decisions in the form of legislation to reauthorize federal education programs. Both houses of Congress have passed bills to do that, but they’re very different and will need to be reconciled. The House version of the bill would effectively kill dedicated funding for afterschool programs, while the Senate version would keep it. This month my organization joined 670 local, state and national organizations in signing a letter that calls on Congress to adopt the Senate version.  

The choice is as scary as it is straightforward. Federal support for afterschool programs is absolutely vital, with more than a million children in programs today because of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative, the principal federal funding stream for afterschool — which the House would effectively eliminate.

In my experience working to support afterschool programs, I’m often struck that parents, educators and policymakers have very different impressions of what programs do. Too many policymakers look to afterschool programs to merely keep children safe or work on their academic skills. Today’s programs do both, but so much more.

Parents and educators see the larger picture. They see kids who are safe, active, inspired and engaged in the afternoons (and during the summer) because they have a place to be with caring adults and thoughtful programming. Parents are relieved to be able to stay at work in the afternoon, secure in the knowledge that their children are supervised and constructively engaged. Students are getting exercise, healthy snacks or meals, learning to prepare nutritious foods, and growing vegetables in community gardens. And both educators and parents see children whose horizons are broadened by hands-on learning opportunities and engagement with the community, which result from partnerships with community-based organizations and businesses that only afterschool programs can create.

Given the huge unmet demand for afterschool, and the plain benefits to health, safety and student success it delivers, we should be talking about increasing our national investment in afterschool to reach the millions of students and families that want and need these programs. But before we can expand federal support for afterschool, we must first save it.