The Countdown to Summer Begins

When I turned the kitchen calendar to the first day of May this week, my older daughter (DD1) asked if it was the last month of school yet?  When I shook my head "no" in response, she asked me to help her construct a calendar on which she could mark off the remaining days of school.  Together, we counted the number of weeks remaining in school, added together the number of total days remaining in school, and then decided upon how to best represent this roster of days in a format through which each day could be easily checked off.  My DD1 organized her calendar into rows of ten squares, each big enough to fit an "x."  And at the end of the rows of square boxes, she drew a smiling sun indicating the first official day of summer vacation.

As my DD1 was constructing her countdown calendar, I asked her what she thought she would miss most about kindergarten when summer vacation got underway.  She replied, "my friends, and my teacher," and then she added, "and getting to learn lots of new stuff every day."  Then she quickly continued that she was really looking forward to summer for many reasons including, going swimming at our local community pool, eating popsicles on our front stoop, running through the sprinklers with her sister, staying up late and sleeping in, staying in her pajamas until lunchtime, going on vacation on the West Coast to see her extended family and cousins, and attending camp at the zoo and our local nature preserve.  I wondered as I listed to my DD1's enticing list, if her friends at school felt the same way she did about the lure of summer.  I took the opportunity to ask her classmates over lunch what they liked best about school and about summer this week.  Several of her peers chimed in that they loved to watch television and play video games when they were not at school, and a couple mentioned that they liked to play with their brothers and/or sisters.  However, when I turned to my daughter's over zealous classmate and asked her whether she preferred school or summer vacation, she quietly replied, "I like school, Mrs. ___."  Her poignant response jarred me out of my summer reverie and reminded me of how for some low-income children the summer months can be the longest months of the year.

In our family, summer is a welcome respite from the grind of the school  year.  Summer affords me and my daughters a chance to move through our days at a different pace without the pressures of being on a strict schedule wherein we have to keep things moving.  Even though my husband and I must head off to work each weekday morning, in the summer months we can do so without the stress related to accomplishing getting our daughters dressed, combing their hair, brushing their teeth, mandating the intake of breakfast, packing school lunches, and remembering what is required for the day away from home.  Instead, we get to luxuriate in the privilege of having a college student babysitter arrive at our house every morning to whom we hand off our daughters until the late afternoon when one or both of us returns home for the evening.  And we get to look forward to hearing a full report over dinner from our girls about what their caregiver engaged them in that day, such as art and craft projects, trips to the library, local parks, and community pool, or bigger outings to the zoo or to the museums.

Decades of research on the summer learning gap or "slide" for low income children documents how much academic learning deteriorates over the summer due to the lack of publicly funded summer school for those children most in need of academic enrichment.  The National Summer Learning Association reports that more than half of the achievement gap between low and middle income students "can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities."  According to their website, research suggests that while all students typically lose the equivalent of two months of mathematical knowledge and computational skill over the summer, low income students also lose several months of progress in reading, even as their middle income peers typically gain slightly in reading over the summer months.

Recently, despite the fact that the percentage of children who qualify for free and reduced lunch remaining the same, our local elementary school lost its classification as a Title I school.  With this re-classification, the district sponsored and supported summer school is no longer available to the low income children at our daughter's school.  As I was reading with my daughter and several of her classmates this week, I was impressed by how adeptly they have started to become readers in English, a language that for many of my daughter's peers differs from the language which is spoken at home.  And I am now left wondering: How can the gaps in English fluency, foundations in literacy and numeracy, and overall enrichment learning experiences between low income and middle income students be closed through schooling when during the summer months these divides widen?   If there is no learning intervention available to our highest needs students during the summer months, how is it possible to expect that they can re-engage in school learning as readily as their more economically privileged peers?