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What After-School Can Look Like in Long Beach Unified — If We Build It Right
Long Beach Unified is one of the most forward-thinking large districts in California. With 63,557 students across 82 schools, you have the scale to do something significant — and your leadership already understands something that many districts are still figuring out: 3pm is not when school stops mattering. It is where a different kind of learning begins.
LBUSD’s investments in expanded learning have been real and sustained. Principals here are not asking whether after-school programs matter. They are asking something harder and more interesting: what should those programs actually look like?
That is the question I want to dig into today — because Long Beach is not a generic California city, and your enrichment programs should not be generic either.
Long Beach Has a Story That After-School Programs Should Be Telling
Think about what surrounds your students. Twenty-five miles from Hollywood. Adjacent to a game industry in Los Angeles that now employs more people than film. Home to one of the most sophisticated logistics operations on the planet, where engineers solve problems at a scale most people cannot comprehend. A small business corridor full of entrepreneurs who built something from nothing.
Your students are growing up inside one of the most economically textured cities in California. The question is whether after-school enrichment helps them see themselves as participants in that economy — or just observers of it.
Here is how Kodely approaches after-school enrichment for LBUSD schools, and why each program connects to something real about Long Beach.
Programs That Fit Long Beach Unified
MakeCode Arcade Game Design (Grades 1-5)
Students design and build their own playable video games — characters, rules, mechanics, the whole thing. This is one of our most popular after-school coding programs in Long Beach USD schools, and for good reason.
The LA games industry is a major employer, and it is growing. When kids in Long Beach build games instead of just playing them, they are doing something that many adults in this city do for a living. That is not a small thing to put in front of a seven-year-old.
There is also a practical dimension here that principals appreciate. With phone bans now in effect across California, schools are rightly asking: what replaces passive screen time? MakeCode Arcade answers that question directly. This is purposeful, creative, deeply engaged screen time — kids solving problems, debugging, making design decisions, and beaming when a classmate plays something they built. If you are looking for STEM after-school programs in Long Beach that also address the phone conversation head-on, this is it.
Junior Shark Tank (Grades 1-5)
Long Beach has real entrepreneurial energy. Walk the small business corridors here and you see people who took a risk, built something, and made it work. Junior Shark Tank brings that spirit into the after-school hour.
Students develop original business ideas, learn to articulate them clearly, and practice pitching in front of an audience. The semester ends with a family pitch event — a real one, where kids present work they have genuinely poured themselves into. Parents show up. Teachers show up. And the kids stand at the front of the room and hold the floor.
Public speaking, decision-making, persuasion, structured creativity — these are outcomes that last well past elementary school. And in a district as large and diverse as LBUSD, programs that connect families to school in a visible, celebratory way matter enormously.
Rube Goldberg Engineering Lab (Grades 1-5)
Chain reaction machines. Ramps, pulleys, levers, dominoes, rubber bands, and endless trial and error. No wrong answers — only iterations.
Long Beach runs one of the most operationally complex ports in the world. The engineers and logistics professionals who keep that operation moving think in systems — inputs, outputs, dependencies, what happens when one piece fails. Rube Goldberg Engineering Lab teaches children to think exactly that way, in a format that is joyful and low-stakes and completely absorbing.
More importantly, it builds engineering identity in kids who have never been told they are engineers. In a high-need school, that matters. When a child realizes they can design something that works — that their ideas have physical consequences in the real world — something shifts. This is one of the most powerful expanded learning programs we run, and it belongs in Long Beach.
Storytelling Through Film and Media (Grades 6-8)
Scriptwriting, cinematography, shot composition, editing, short film production from concept to final cut. This program is built for middle schoolers, and it is built for Long Beach.
Twenty-five miles from Hollywood. Every student in this district has a story that deserves to be told well. Film and media literacy gives them the technical vocabulary and the creative confidence to tell it on their own terms. These are not toy exercises — students produce real short films. The skills they develop translate directly into one of the most accessible creative industries in Southern California.
For principals running after-school programs in LBUSD’s middle schools, this is the kind of program that changes how a student sees themselves by the time the semester ends.
Funding: Here Is What Long Beach Principals Need to Know Right Now
ELOP funding is formula-based and it is already allocated to your school. If you have not mapped your ELOP dollars to your 2026-27 expanded learning plan, talk to your expanded learning coordinator before June 30 — the LCAP deadline is not flexible, and ELOP funding Long Beach schools receive is significant enough to support robust after-school programming.
Title IV-A is the most underused funding source in California right now. Schools are eligible for up to $1,300 per pupil for well-being, technology, and enrichment. Most schools leave it on the table. If your school qualifies, this can fund multiple Kodely programs with little administrative complexity.
For schools in year two of planning, 21st CCLC is
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