Rishabh Mishra has long been a fan of summer school.
“It’s a promise that you can learn an incredible amount of information in a short period of time,” said Mishra, who recently graduated from Shakopee High School and will enter the University of Minnesota this fall as a junior, more than halfway to a computer science degree.
Mishra spent many of his summer days learning about computers at the Gifted and Talented Institute, a series of summer classes offered by Burnsville-Eagan-Savage schools community education in collaboration with other south metro districts. This summer, Mishra returned to Eagle Ridge Junior High in Savage not as a student, but as an instructor to share his knowledge of computer programming.
Mishra and other students at the institute are an example of the changing face of summer school. No longer is it just for helping struggling students; often, the extended break is a time to nourish students’ interests and establish new ones.
“It’s a time to explore,” said Lori Haggerty, who helps coordinate the Burnsville program. “It helps enhance learning in fun ways so students don’t lose skills.”
Skill loss over the summer, what educators call “summer slide,” is one of the biggest challenges facing students and teachers, said Gary Huggins, CEO of the Baltimore-based National Summer Learning Association, which advocates for improved educational offerings in the summer months.
While summer educational programs like Burnsville’s Gifted and Talented Institute exist around the metro and across the country, they are not accessible to all students.
Students who sit idle over the summer lose, on average, two months of grade-level math skills, Huggins’ institute found. Low-income students can lose more than two months of reading skills while their more affluent counterparts often make slight gains.
Two-thirds of teachers the institute surveyed said they spend up to a month reteaching skills students lost over the summer break.
“It is costly for kids and horribly inefficient for our system,” Huggins said. “Summer is a break from school, but it doesn’t have to be a break from learning. If it is, it becomes costly.”
Some students’ need to relearn skills and concepts contributes directly to the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their affluent and white counterparts.
“We will never close achievement gaps if we don’t address summer learning loss,” Huggins said.
Many school districts are starting to get that message, but there is still work to be done. About 14 million students nationwide now attend some type of summer school or camp with an education focus. Another 24 million students would attend programs if they were available and accessible, he said.
The growing focus on summer learning can easily be seen in the Twin Cities. Here are a few examples:
— Institutions like the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley, the Minnesota Historical Society and the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul offer classes, camps and other programming.
— Last year, St. Paul Public Schools partnered with city officials to beef up summer programming across the city. In addition to typical summer school offerings, efforts include arts and science enrichment and improved access to libraries.
— Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan schools modified the district’s summer school, called Camp Propel, so it focuses more on preparing students for the next school year rather than a review of material. District officials also moved summer classes closer to the start of the academic year.
Huggins says these types of programs and changes are “right on the mark,” but the challenge of access remains for many students and their families.
At the Burnsville gifted summer program, enrollment has held strong at about 300 students even as competition has increased, said Cindy Check, the institute’s coordinator. Yet, only a handful of participants request scholarships intended to lessen the cost of the summer courses for low-income families.
Check said the program is trying to do a better job getting the word out about the scholarships to hopefully attract more low-income students. Forty percent of Burnsville-Eagan-Savage students now qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a federal indicator of poverty.
The lifelong benefits of summer learning are clearly evident in students like Mishra, whose younger brother Ritik, 8, hopes to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Not only will the recent high school graduate enter college more than halfway to a computer science bachelor’s degree, he’s accepted an internship with the U.S. Department of Defense for next summer.
Mishra acknowledges how additional education opportunities helped to shape his academic success.
“If a student learns 12 months out of the year, they’re going to be ahead of someone who learns only nine,” he said.
Christopher Magan can be reached at 651-228-5557. Follow him at twitter.com/cmaganPiPress.
