YMCA Beacons/School Success centers provide safe, culturally relevant places for youth in kindergarten through 12th grade to grow their academic and social skills after school and during the summer. These centers of hope engage youth as leaders and learners through challenging activities, caring relationships and meaningful leadership experiences.

The School Success program partners with licensed teachers to deliver academic exploration topics, and provides a broad range of high quality enrichment opportunities such as youth leadership and service, academic enrichment, career and college readiness, quality arts experiences, health and wellness, cultural exploration and family involvement. The program uses a strengths-based approach to build youth's sense of confidence, belonging, and ownership. These are vital ingredients for healthy youth development. Programs like School Success wouldn’t be possible without community partners’ support. Companies like St. Paul-based Ecolab help to make the School Success program possible.

Ecolab is committed to delivering premium levels of service to their customers in order to help them achieve cleaner, healthier and safer surroundings. They also take the same passionate approach to service in the communities where they live and work.  Ecolab is a champion for St. Paul youth, providing critical support for this programming for many years. “Ecolab is proud to partner with the YMCA to make sure that all students in St. Paul have access to quality enrichment opportunities,” said Kris Taylor, Vice President, Global Community Relations.

With the help of partners like Ecolab, the YMCA is able to deliver School Success at no charge to youth or their families. This is critical because many of the youth we serve are low-income youth, and children of color, who might not otherwise have access to quality programs outside of school hours and our experience has shown that young people who participate in School Success are over twice as likely to graduate on time as those who don’t.