State officials funneled a total of $250,000 through local United Ways across the state to expand summer school in seven cities, including Springfield and Holyoke.
Kemia Arnold, 8, a student at the DeBerry School in Springfield, participated in a state-funded summer school program that joined local schools with area businesses and non-profit organizations.
After spending five weeks in summer school, 8-year-old Kemia K. Arnold was reading much better, and she wrote a short story she is proud to show.
“Before the summer program she was having a little problem with reading,” says Marie E. Arnold, her grandmother. “It helped her a lot with her comprehension.”
Arnold, a student at William N. DeBerry School in Springfield, is among more than 1,800 children across the commonwealth who benefited from a state Department of Early Education and Care program that created new summer school programs by linking schools with community agencies.
State officials funneled a total of $250,000 through local United Ways across the state to expand summer school in seven cities, including Springfield and Holyoke.
As school officials start debating if it is worth funding summer school programs and parents start considering if it is worth forcing their children to spend time in a hot classroom during vacation, a study shows the programs can be valuable.
The recently released study showed 85 percent of the 1,822 children involved in the programs lost no abilities during the summer and 68 percent improved reading skills. The study did also find that 15 percent of the children showed a significant loss of skills, but officials attribute that number to poor attendance by some children.
In Western Massachusetts, the money allowed the Hasbro Summer Learning Initiative to start a new summer school program for 21 children at DeBerry, which Arnold attended, and add classes for 104 more children at the YMCA of Greater Springfield and the Martin Luther King Citizen School held at the John J. Duggan Middle School.
It also allowed the Holyoke Boys & Girls Club to add a new satellite program, also under the Hasbro Initiative, at the low-income Toepfort Apartments. That program provided services for 26 students.
The idea was to use existing programs and expand partnerships with schools and other agencies. It also funded formal research to see if any of the programs helped, according to the state’s early education commissioner Sherri R. Killins.
“It was not much money and I was quite proud with the results,” Killins said. “We took programs that were doing this kind of work and gave them more opportunities.”
Sherri KillinsThe main goal of the summer school was to prevent children from losing skills over the summer; some have to re-learn as much as three months of academics after vacation, Killins said.
Arnold doesn’t need figures to praise the program. As a parent aide and case manager for Northern Educational Service, she visits DeBerry school several times a week to work with clients. There, she learned about the summer school and asked that her granddaughter attend.
“You had to force her to read,” Arnold said. “She could read the words, but she didn’t understand.”
When Arnold would pick her up after summer classes, her granddaughter would show off the Mexican art, paiper mache masks and other art projects that she created. She hopes the program will be available again this year.
“I liked the field trips, the activities, the writing and the games,” Kemia said. She also has a favorite book, “The Magic School Bus,” thanks to the reading help.
In Springfield, the Hasbro Corp. started the summer initiative six years ago and has donated at least $100,000 a year. Other businesses and agencies, including Pioneer Valley United Way and the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, are supporters as well, said Susan L. O’Connor, director of the Hasbro Summer Initiative.
The addition of the Department of Early Education into the program was welcome, especially since it gave educators across the state a chance to coordinate and share ideas. It also gave the program a chance to formally study if children were improving, O’Connor said.
“It has really changed the way we operate after-school and summer programs,” she said. “It has shifted how we use out-of-school time.”
Most of the classes were taught by adults trained as day-care providers who do not have formal teaching degrees. The grant allowed each site to hire certified teachers who worked as literacy coaches to help the instructors improve their teaching, said Kathleen A. Coleman, assistant vice president with Square One. Square One provided the summer school teachers to DeBerry school and other sites.
“We absolutely benefited,” Coleman said. “Many of our teachers are in college and do not have a degree. Tthey are a young staff and a great staff.”
Kemia Arnold and her grandmother, Marie Arnold.Square One used the curriculum from the Hasbro initiative to help students focus deeply on one subject, such as a type of science, engineering or theater. Since the main goal is to improve reading skills, it intertwines literacy throughout the lessons, she said.
Because it was designed to work with a child-care center, children attended summer school for a full day from about 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Along with academics, they were served breakfast and lunch, had physical education and learned nutrition, Coleman said.
There were field trips to places like the Boston Science Museum, which families might not have been able to afford without the program, Coleman said.
At the Holyoke Boys & Girls Club, the new program allowed staff to work side-by-side with reading teachers from Springfield and Holyoke schools, executive director Eileen D. Cavanaugh said.
“It did something different. It allowed us to train our staff in literacy strategies and best practices so we are more intentional with our programming,” she said.
Using the lessons they learned over the summer, staff created literacy centers which now offer activities such as read-alouds, writing groups, reading buddies where an older student pairs up with a younger child, she said.
While the public schools do offer summer school, Cavanaugh said, there are advantages to get community groups involved in the education of young students.
“If they only go to school, you do not have a well-rounded child,” she said. “We have a good relationship with the schools, and the kids who take advantage of the club are the kids who are graduating from high school and going to college.”
Eileen CavanaughAnother benefit arises as the club retains a long relationship with parents since many enroll their children when they are in elementary school and those students remain sometimes through high school and college where they work as staff, Cavanaugh said.
In Springfield, there is limited space in the summer school classes designed for third-graders and older students. This program gave access to children in kindergarten through second-grade, noted DeBerry principal Mary B. Worthy.
Using a reading test common in early grades, she found children increased a small amount in fluency as well as retaining the skills they gained. Even more important, students’ attitudes toward school seemed to change, she said.
“They certainly had more interest in school,” Worthy said. “They were motivated and engaged, and that means a lot. It is extremely important in terms of willingness to learn.”
Worthy said her only complaint was that she would have liked to offer the opportunity to at least 50 of her 265 children. It proved difficult to select just 21 since most could have benefited from the five-week program.