Pueden encontrar la versión en español aquí.
Summit54’s “Summer Advantage” program is working to reverse summer learning losses in the Roaring Fork School District, and student assessments show significant gains over the course of the five-week academic program.
The program hosts classes and field trips at Basalt, Crystal River, and Glenwood Springs elementary schools.
Thirty students from the Aspen School District also participated this summer.
Terri Caine is the co-founder of Summit54, the nonprofit that runs Summer Advantage.
While visiting the program at Basalt Elementary School, she said the students start every day with a mindfulness activity because mornings can be difficult for kids as they rush to school and juggle other family stressors.
“Our brains are not capable of absorbing and retaining information when we're stressed,” Caine said. “A couple of minutes of FocusedKids [activities] gives the children an opportunity to relax and prepare their brains to learn.”
Caine said she helped start the program 12 years ago after budget cuts left some school districts without funding for summer school.
“Many of our children were left at home because parents were both working, and they didn't have child care,” Caine said. “So children in some cases were told to stay inside, and they spent the days watching TV and playing video games.”
But more than child care, the program also addresses summer learning deficits that lead to gaps in achievement as students progress in school.
In 2020, Brown University published a study that found the average elementary or middle school student in the U.S. loses 19% to 28% of their school year gains in English and 25% to 34% of their gains in math over the summer. And those summer losses build up over the years.
Caine said these findings are not new.
“There's a great deal of research actually over almost 100 years that shows that children that are not engaged in some type of academic program during the summer, especially low income children, will regress up to three months during the summer break.”
Brown University’s research doesn’t take into account significant pandemic learning losses that exacerbated these trends for low-income families.
But it does acknowledge that summer learning loss can contribute to race, ethnic or socioeconomic gaps.
ProPublica’s Miseducation project found that in 2016, Hispanic students in the Roaring Fork School District were an average of 2.8 grades behind white students academically.
Caine said Summer Advantage predominantly serves Latino students, and that shapes how they structure their classrooms.
“About 87% of our students are Latino,” Caine said. “About 74% [of students] are English language learners. In most cases we have an English speaker and a Spanish speaker in every classroom.”
When students arrive at Summer Advantage for the day, they start with a mindfulness practice, move onto a few hours of English and math instruction, eat lunch, and play outside with their friends.
It’s a long day, but Dylan, Moises, and Clark, who are all going into 5th grade, love the program.
“They make it fun,” Moises said. “We go different places. And Fridays, we do field trips.”
For these three, math is their favorite subject, and Moises said he’d rather be here than at home all summer.
He said that if he was left at home, he’d be bored playing video games all day.
“I'd rather be with my boys.” Moises said.
Clark said that the program is helping them prepare for middle school.
“It helps us be smarter, and we can be now ready for fifth grade,” Clark said.
To track their progress, students at Summer Advantage take pre-assessments and post-assessments at the beginning and end of every summer.
Caine says that on average, students gain the equivalent of two-and-a-half to four months of learning in just five weeks of the program, depending on the subject.
That’s great news for Dylan, Moises, and Clark, who are all entering middle school next month, but that’s not why kids come back every summer.
“Most of the children look at this program as fun,” Caine said. “You know, if you ask them, why do you want to come here? And their answer will be, ‘Because it's fun.’”
For roughly 600 students, the Summer Advantage program wraps up Friday. They’ll have just a few weeks off before the brand new school year begins.
