The National Summer Learning Week (July 11-15) is a celebration dedicated to advocacy and awareness in elevating the importance of keeping kids learning to ensure they return ready to succeed in the new school year.
During the summers our most vulnerable students typically lose ground compared to their more affluent peers. Traditional summer school, in too many settings, tends to overly focus on credit recovery (grade replacement) and remediation, and for far too few, acceleration and/or enrichment.
But these days, summer is more so embraced as an opportunity for academic enrichment and exploration for all. I’ve noticed that each year, more school districts offer summer programming that provides opportunities for students of all academic abilities so that students who excel in the classroom are supported just as much as those who need extra help over the summer. When every school in a school district provides summer learning opportunities that include enrichment or advanced curriculum opportunities, every student wins.
The summer also provides an excellent opportunity for schools to engage families and community organizations as partners in education. With little effort, schools can help parents identify summer learning opportunities. Schools can create a clearing house of information posted on their website or social media page that helps keep families informed of free events taking place in local communities like skill building, amazing arts, or wellness, for example.
Schools can refer families to their neighborhood library’s summer reading club or organize their own school summer book club, creating an opportunity for students to take charge and choose the featured book of the week or month. Educators can pool their resources and compile a list of online tools available for parents to help mitigate the summer slide. A quick check-in with families via a phone call informing them of the availability of all of these resources with instructions on how to access the resource page the school has created will also help foster positive communication between schools and families before the first day of school.
Schools do not and should not shoulder the responsibility of summer learning opportunities in a vacuum. Increasingly, school districts are beginning to partner with community organizations to provide programming that serves a wide variety of student interests in ways that that are fun and hands-on. For example, imagine the joy experienced by a kid whose summer exploits include participation in summer camp, horseback riding, or a kayaking adventure.
The National Summer Learning Association’s (NSLA) Discover Summer offers a search tool to provide families with easier access to summer programming (in-person and virtual) for their respective communities at Discover Summer | InPlay.org. Connection with community organizations is also a great way to ensure summer enrichment opportunities for students are inclusive and/or focus specific. A final example of powerful summer learning collaboration is the partnership with the NBA Foundation, NSLA welcomed its inaugural Class of 2022 with 10 young leaders who are alumni of their respective partner programs and participating in a summer policy internship working on Capitol Hill.
As we all bask in the relative ease of summer, there is still much we can do as public school educators to help ensure that our students continue to participate in enriching, fun, and educational opportunities that can help minimize the summer slide and expand the their potential for success.