The Center for Educational Options' May 19, 2016 Networking Meeting is focusing on Planning for Summer: Developing Fun and Engaging Literacy Activities. Hear from staff of the Dorothy Bennett Mercy Center, Inc. and how they got staff and youth excited about books and reading. Participants should bring a literacy activity they have done or are planning to do and will have opportunities to share their activities and go back to their program with literacy activities for their summer programs. The meeting is from 10:00 am - 1:00 pm at the Partnership for After School Education, 120 Broadway, New York, NY. To register, email annehlawrence@gmail.com by May 17, 2016. The Networking Meeting Series is funded by a Robert Bowne Foundation Legacy Grant.

Graduate NYC and the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Readiness (OPSR) invite you to a Community Best Practices Forum and Professional Development Session: Putting the Career in College and Career Readiness. Taking place on June 9, 2016 at TKP Center, this forum will examine how students can become more informed about a broad array of career paths, prepare for their own, individualized career path, and understand the skills and competencies required to enter and be successful in those pathways. Complete the registration form by May 25, 2016.

At 1:00 pm ET on May 20, 2016, ADP is hosting a webcast, New Overtime Rules are Published: What Now? The Department of Labor (DOL) is expected to publish the final overtime rules in mid-May. Tammy McCutchen, Principal at Littler and the former Administrator of the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, will present the details of the final rules, compliance timeline, and its potential impact to your organization. Register to participate.

A new evaluation of School’s Out New York City (SONYC), supported by the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), finds that the initiative offers New York City middle schoolers a pathway to success through high-quality afterschool programming. Their program connects youth to supportive adults who provide engaging and educational activities to help achieve SONYC’s five main goals: fostering holistic youth success, encouraging youth to explore their interests, building skills to support academic achievement, cultivating youth leadership and community engagement, and engaging invested individuals in supporting these goals. Download the evaluation.

A new report by Policy Studies Associates, Inc., ExpandED Schools National Demonstration: Lessons For Scale And Sustainability, highlights some ways in which schools and community organizations come together to provide children with critical enrichment activities that enhance knowledge and expand horizons beyond core academics during the school day. The report investigates schools’ use of the ExpandED Schools model, which seeks to use partnerships between public schools, community organizations and intermediary organizations to increase enrichment opportunities for children. Over four years, researchers studied the use of this model in 10 schools in three cities — New York City, Baltimore and New Orleans. In this report, they identify the parts of the model that were easiest for the schools to implement, parts that proved more challenging, and strategies schools used to overcome hurdles along the way. Download the report.