‘Sleepwalking into a crisis’: Summer programs catch on as money runs out

LYNN, Mass. — In a middle school classroom in this Colonial-era city north of Boston, four 13- and 14-year-old boys were creating a poster with icons of their favorite apps. Ruler in hand, Enthonny Silva carefully delineated a box with the Netflix logo, while Guarionex Sanchez sketched the WhatsApp logo freehand.

None of the boys chose to be in school in the middle of July — they said their moms made them go. “She didn’t want me at home, sleeping all the time,” Guarionex said.

Yet all four said the program, which pairs project-based learning with enrichment in the arts and sports, is more fun than they expected.

Summer learning programs like this one, which serves low-income students who are typically two to three years behind in reading, have proliferated since the pandemic, buoyed by billions in federal recovery dollars doled out by the states over the past three years. Nationwide, more than 8 in 10 districts offered summer programs in 2023, many free of charge.

Yet summer programs still aren’t operating at a large enough scale to make a significant dent in the country’s Covid-related learning loss, researchers say, and the federal money is running out. Some programs are preparing to cut staff and services and reduce the number of students they serve next summer, while others, like the Dream MORE program for middle schoolers, in Lynn, are working to replace the recovery money with grants and donations.

Patrick Stanton, executive director of the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership, a nonprofit that supports after-school and summer learning providers, said he believes families are in for a nasty shock come next summer. Programs are going to close, he warned, and waitlists will grow even longer.

“We’re sleepwalking into a crisis,” Stanton said.

But it’s not too late for schools to double down on summer learning. Districts have until the end of September to allocate the remaining $34.1 billion of the money Congress provided in pandemic recovery funds. At least some of that money could go to summer programs.

Schools can also try to tap into other federal funding streams to sustain summer programs, according to consulting firm EducationCounsel, which created a guide for districts.

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The pandemic set back students from all income levels, with the average third through eighth grader losing the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a quarter of a year of learning in reading between the spring of 2019 and 2022.

But low-income students saw steeper losses than wealthier ones, and the achievement gap between rich and poor districts grew .

Massachusetts schools consistently rank among the best in the country. But the state saw the biggest widening in the gap between districts serving low-income and high-income students, and among richer and poorer students within the same district, according to an analysis by The Harvard Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project.

No district was harder hit than Lynn, where three-quarters of students are low-income, and where the share of English language learners rose 75 percent over the course of the pandemic, to 43 percent today. Students in this city of 100,000, whose now-shuttered shoe factories provided a gateway to the middle class for immigrants in the industrial age, lost the equivalent of two years of learning in math and 1 1⁄2 in reading, the analysis shows.

The $122 billion in pandemic-relief aid that Congress included for K-12 schools in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act was supposed to turn things around for districts like Lynn. The law required states to spend 5 percent of their share of the funds on “evidence-based interventions aimed specifically at addressing learning loss,” and set aside 1 percent of the money specifically for summer enrichment programs. It directed local education agencies, which received the bulk of the aid, to spend at least 20 percent of it on efforts to address learning loss.

Summer learning was the most popular strategy chosen by districts, with 3 out of 4 including it in their spending plans.

By February of this year, $8.1 billion in rescue plan dollars for schools had flowed to after-school and summer programs, along with another $2.1 billion of the aid sent to state, territorial, local and Tribal governments, according to estimates by the Afterschool Alliance. That influx of money allowed after-school and summer programs to serve 5 million new students between 2021 and 2024, the Alliance says.

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs

Massachusetts has funneled close to $20 million in rescue plan dollars to after-school and summer programs through nonprofit intermediaries, with the majority of the money going to low-income districts like Lynn.

Even so, some low-income districts, including Lynn, have fallen further behind their wealthier peers, with learning losses continuing into the 2022-23 academic year, the Harvard and Stanford study found.

That doesn’t mean that summer learning programs aren’t making a difference. One recent study found that a program created by Bloomberg Philanthropies (which also commissioned the study) since the pandemic has helped students at public charter schools in eight cities recover 31 percent of Covid-related learning loss in math and 22 percent in reading.

But another study , which looked at the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts, found only modest gains in math and none in reading. To recover to pre-pandemic levels in math, the average district would need to send every student to a five-week summer school with two hours of math instruction for two to three years, the study found.

The problem, it appears, is that too many students are skipping out of  summer learning, said Miles Davison, a research scientist at NWEA, a testing organization and one of the authors of the study. An average of just 13 percent of students in the districts surveyed in the study enrolled in summer programs.

Davison and other experts believe that’s partly because families haven’t fully grasped how far behind their kids remain academically.

Related: Why schools are teaching word problems all wrong

The mention of “summer school” often elicits groans from students. The term conjures up images of struggling students toiling away in un-air-conditioned classrooms while their more fortunate classmates escape to summer camps and vacation homes.

Many of today’s “summer learning” programs are different, though, blending hands-on projects with fun activities. Unlike traditional summer school, students aren’t forced to enroll –  they’re enticed to by free meals and transportation, and by lessons like the ones Lynn offers in cooking, dance, drama, sports, and song and video production.

“If summer school and summer camp had a baby, you’d get summer learning,” said Aaron Philip Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association.

At its best, summer learning is an opportunity not only to help kids catch up academically, but to get them re-engaged and re-connected to school, said Erik Peterson, senior vice president of policy of the Afterschool Alliance. And given the strong connection between student engagement and attendance, summer learning has the potential to bring down chronic absenteeism rates that have spiked since the pandemic, Peterson says.

Students in Lynn’s Dream MORE program, a partnership between the district and the nonprofit LEAP for Education , have shown gains in social emotional skills such as self-regulation and engagement, which are correlated with academic achievement .

The program lets students choose from a half dozen project-based learning experiences, including robotics, cyberbullying and “Life as a Young Teen,” the course in which the boys were making the poster about apps. Newcomer students are steered toward “Migration Stories,” while environmentalists might opt for “Eco-Warriors.”

In a recent class on “Culture and Cloth,” students watched a video about Navajo weaving, then sketched a design for a miniature weave they’ll create on a popsicle stick frame.

Rising sixth grader Savannah Nolan, who had already sketched a black spider on the back of her hand, practiced drawing on the nail of her friend, Sarahi Valerio. Savannah said her mom told her she could quit the program after the first day if she hated it, but she’s decided to stay.

“I’ve met so many friends,” she said. “I like that we do projects, and they let us use our phones” — something regular school forbids. She added, “We’re going to go on field trips if we behave.”

“And we’re good kids, so we’re going to,” chimed in rising sixth grader Sarahi, who is sketching a rainbow and a lollipop. (“It’s going to be Candyland,” she explained. “All pink.”)

Dream MORE, which opened virtually in 2020, benefitted from $25,000 in pandemic recovery dollars in 2022 and 2023. The program tapped into its reserves this year, and is ramping up fundraising for next year, said Linda Saris, executive director of LEAP. But competition for donations from individuals, foundations and corporations “will be intense,” Saris said.

A 2022 survey by the Afterschool Alliance found that programs that received recovery aid used the money to hire more staff, serve more students and expand program offerings.

That growth is now at risk, with more than half of superintendents in a separate survey reporting that they’ll be forced to cut spending on summer programs when the federal dollars run dry.

Related : PROOF POINTS: Summer school programs too short and not popular enough to reverse pandemic learning loss, researchers say

But there’s still time to postpone some of those cuts for at least a year. Though Congress gave schools only until the end of January 2025 to spend down their remaining recovery money, the Education Department is allowing districts to apply for an extension that would give them another 14 months to liquidate the funds.

If granted an extension, districts could continue to pay outside providers of summer programs through March 2026.

Still, researchers who have been tracking students’ post-pandemic academic recovery say districts and states need to be thinking longer term, and tackling learning loss from multiple angles — not solely through summer learning. If they don’t, the setbacks that students have suffered as a result of the pandemic could follow them into adulthood, said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University who co-leads research on learning loss at the university’s Center for Education Policy Research.

“It’s pretty clear that the high-poverty districts in Massachusetts will not have caught up by the time the money runs out,” Kane said.

This story about summer learning was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter .

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