Mayor Jorge Elorza announced the creation of a Summer Learning Task Force earlier this month, charged with developing recommendations to help students retain material learned during the academic year over the summer.
This effect, commonly referred to as learning loss, disproportionately affects low-income families living in urban areas, said Jennie Johnson, co-chair of the task force and executive director and vice president of City Year Providence, Rhode Island's chapter of a nonprofit AmeriCorps program dedicated to keeping students in school.
The task force comprises 30 school officials, policy leaders and community members, including Dilania Inoa ’99, program manager for elementary and middle school programs at the Swearer Center for Public Service.
Summer learning loss is responsible for more than half of the academic achievement gap between higher- and lower-income youth, as students of more limited means often cannot pay for expensive summer programs, wrote Lily Gutterman ’14.5, a policy associate in Elorza’s office, in an email to The Herald.
The Summer Learning Task Force will face the challenge of making sure that the city has “enough of these programs to be accessible and affordable to low-income families,” said Kenneth Wong, professor of education policy and chair of the education department.
Currently, Providence students spend six to eight weeks, or 20 percent of the school year, reviewing material covered in the previous grade level, Wong said, adding that Elorza’s task force should strive to reduce the time spent re-learning previously taught concepts.
“Any amount of hours or time that our children are losing in terms of learning time and engaging time … is too much time,” Johnson said. Learning loss not only causes students to fall behind academically but also to lose opportunities engaging with peers and working in teams, she added.
A variety of summer learning programs already exist in Providence. City Year Providence endeavors to meet the needs of students in urban classrooms that do not provide individualized attention. The organization hopes to launch a summer academy in Providence this coming year based on a successful model in place at other City Year locations throughout the country, Johnson said.
The University’s education department also organizes the Brown Summer High School, a program which annually serves about 200 students from urban school districts for five weeks, Wong said. BSHS requires a $180 tuition fee and places students into classes that correspond with their academic interests and strengths in order to create an environment conducive to learning, he added.
“There are great programs being implemented in Providence to address summer learning loss, but there is a gap in city-wide opportunities that are accessible to all,” Gutterman wrote. The Summer Learning Task Force will seek to bridge this gap through recommendations that will be submitted to the mayor in early 2016.
To meet this goal, the task force will study the summer learning practices that have worked both locally and nationally and then decide what can be accomplished with the resources available in Providence, Johnson said.
Gutterman added that the task force is consulting a report on effective summer learning programs produced by the Wallace Foundation, a national philanthropy group.
The limits on financial capital and other resources will have to be taken into account as the task force formulates plans to improve and expand existing summer programs and possibly pioneer new ones.
But “It is our job as the adult stakeholders to make sure (limited funding) is not a barrier … and when it is, to remove it,” Johnson said. Gutterman said the task force will focus on ensuring that safe transportation and meals are available to students, while still maintaining affordable tuition.
The task force will also need to consider how to best balance academics and other forms of enrichment in summer programs. The flexibility of these programs allows them to include “non-traditional modes and sites of learning,” Gutterman said.
“Anything we’ll provide to our students needs to be well-rounded and address all of the ways in which they can learn about … the world around them,” Johnson said.
These sorts of multi-faceted programs are a way to help students from low-income backgrounds stay healthy, active and engaged during the summer by providing balanced meals and offering children opportunities to explore academic areas that interest and excite them, Gutterman said.
Though Johnson said she recognizes the importance of summer learning opportunities in Providence, chronic absenteeism during the school year is just as serious a problem as summer learning loss. Approximately 35 percent of Providence public school students were “chronically absent” last year, meaning they missed at keast 10 percent of the school year, Johnson said, adding she hopes that her work on the task force will enable her to begin addressing chronic absence as well.
A previous version of this article misidentified Rhode Island's chapter of a nonprofit Americorps program. It is City Year Providence, not City Year Rhode Island. The Herald regrets the error.
