Nearly all children forget some of what they know over the summer. But researchers have discovered that poor children tend to forget more — so much more that by ninth grade, according to a 2007 study, two-thirds of the achievement gap between children from low-income and middle-class families can be explained by what happens during summer.
Demand outpaces supply
Nonetheless, school systems faced with shrinking budgets have curtailed summer offerings.
D.C. public schools offered about 5,100 summer school slots this year — down more than half from the enrollment of 10,720 last year. Prince George’s County schools have summer slots for 2,250 children, less than 2 percent of those enrolled in the county’s public schools.
Fairfax County has cut summer school funding from $22.6 million in 2007 to $8.9 million this year, according to county summer school director Levi Folly. Fairfax once offered about 4,000 summer school slots at the elementary level and the same number at the middle school level, he said, but now there almost none.
Similar cuts have occurred across the country in cities such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle.
The national network of Horizons programs, meanwhile, has managed to grow.
Founded in 1964 at a private school in Connecticut, Horizons National began expanding in the 1990s and now operates at 20 sites in 10 cities as far west as Denver.
In the Washington area, the program recently added two sites. In 2009, St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School in the Palisades began hosting students from the District’s public Bancroft Elementary School in Mount Pleasant. Last year, the private Norwood School in Bethesda opened its doors to students from Montgomery County’s public Rock Creek Forest Elementary School.
Host schools offer free classroom space and other in-kind resources, and private donors provide funding.
In the past two years, the Wallace and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, among others, have poured millions of dollars into identifying, studying and replicating successful summer programs for needy students.
The Wal-Mart Foundation last month announced a grant of $11.5 million spread among summer learning programs in 10 cities. A recipient in the District was Higher Achievement, a four-year program for middle school students. The grant helped offset shrinking government support.
“We’d like to be able to invest in things that are going to work, obviously, and the return on investment on this I think is very high,” said Wal-Mart Foundation President Margaret McKenna.
Private funding cannot entirely make up for lower public spending, however. Reliable national data on student summer activities are difficult to come by, but demand for educational programs outpaces supply.
Nicolasa Vigil, mother of 12-year-old Ashley, said she is grateful that her daughter is one of the lucky few who found their way to Horizons. She called the program, which costs her just $25 a year, a “blessing.”
“There are a limited number of summer camps, but they’re so expensive that I don’t think we would be able to afford them,” she said. “That’s just the reality.”
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