School’s out for summer, but for some that presents challenges.
Parents and educators know the very real and often serious impacts resulting from the summer break. Between the end of one school year and the start of the next, the learning loss — or “Summer Slide” as it has come to be known — leads to a slip in school year gains. Studies have found that students in grades 1-8 could, on average, lose between 17-34% of their school year gains over the summer break. Children from low-income and minority-dense areas are more likely to see achievement gaps, as many low-income families lack access to books and summer programming.
And it’s not just an educational loss. In many schools across the state and here in Mercer County, students rely on school-provided meals. When summer rolls around and those school breakfasts, snacks and lunches go away, students can go hungry. Families now have to spend more — if they can — at the grocery store to make up the difference. Some students might be left wondering where their next meal is coming from.
This is where we step in to help.
Mercer Street Friends offers a Summer Bridge program to combat summer slide — a five-week summer enrichment program that “bridges” the gap between school years with grade-specific lessons in math, reading and SEL (social emotional learning).
Each summer, students at Mercer Street Friends Community Schools — elementary and middle schools in Trenton and Hamilton — take part in Summer Bridge at no cost to families or districts. While academic lessons keep our students’ minds sharp, they are complemented by enrichment activities that ignite the students’ passions, such as art, music, fashion, gardening, video production comic-book design and sports.
Every Friday our students are exposed to fun and exciting field trips around the region – excursions include the Crayola factory, Diggerland, iFly indoor skydiving and ball games at the Trenton Thunder. I’m most excited to see our students visit America’s Grow a Row, the state’s largest nonprofit farm — here students harvest food, learn how to prepare fruit and veggies, and even bring a bag of produce home.
These enrichment activities inspire our students to dream and empower them to cultivate hobbies that interest them and enrich their academic journeys. And every student is supplied with breakfast, lunch and a snack, as well as a food bag on Fridays for the weekend.
This year, we will serve more than 300 students from preschool to middle school. The results we have seen over the last 10 years we have offered Summer Bridge are astounding. Over the course of these five weeks of instruction, a percentage of our elementary students grew one full reading level by the time the new school year starts. Middle school students saw a 22-point gain in their reading scores. Those students also increased their math scores, on pre- and post-tests, by about 20 points.
The data is impressive enough, but programs like Summer Bridge have intangible benefits we will never be able to count. Over the summer, students are engaged in the classroom experiencing new places and opportunities with dedicated educators committed to showing them a world beyond Mercer County. The families and guardians of our students don’t have to scramble to find childcare or a summer camp; they can continue working to provide the life they seek for their families.
Programs like Summer Bridge are made possible both by supporters and by support from the state. I cannot overstate the importance of programs like Summer Bridge in the lives of our students — I hope to see programs like it expand in the future
Randall West is the CEO of Mercer Street Friends
