s and provide support for families, schools and the rest of the communities. Most significantly, programs that offer educational activities are particularly effective in offering the most nurturing environment for the children (in Mediavilla, 2001).
Based on the findings of the reports, it is evident that effective homework centers provided by the public libraries can offer an ideal environment for young people during the critical after-school hours. In the remainder of this paper, the following topic areas regarding homework centers will be explored: a) Segments of communities served by homework centers; b) Essential elements of homework centers; c) Benefits of homework centers; and d) Challenges of creating and maintaining homework centers. This comprehensive examination should thus offer invaluable insights to youth librarians who are given the responsibility for running homework centers.
Segments of Communities Served by Homework Centers
Currently, slightly more than 14 percent of public libraries in the country provide some form of after-school homework help to students ranging from elementary to high school levels. Each of these libraries includes one or more homework centers (Mediavilla, 2003). Although homework assistance programs have existed since the mid-1980s, homework centers in public libraries have escalated in numbers in response to the rapidly rising number of latchkey children. According to Dowd (1999), the number of latchkey children ranged from two to seven million. Many of these unattended children go to public libraries (Dowd, 1992, 1999). According to Dowd's (1999) survey of 125 public library systems, 75 percent of the libraries catered to an average of 21 unattended children aged between ten and 12 years during the after-school hours, at least three days a week. Homework centers have thus been created primarily to serve this population of students (Dowd, 1999; Mediavilla, 2001, 2003).
A...