Another side effect: Many kids head to summer school

With her three teenagers vaccinated against COVID-19, Aja Purnell-Mitchell left it up to them to decide whether to go back to school during summer break.

The decision was unanimous: summer school.

“Getting them back into it, helping them socialize back with their friends, maybe meet some new people, and of course, pick up the things that they lacked on Zoom,” the Durham County, North Carolina, mother said, ticking off her hopes for the session ahead, which will be the first time her children have been in the classroom since the outbreak took hold in the spring of 2020.

Across the U.S., more children than ever before could be in classrooms for summer school this year to make up for lost learning during the outbreak, which caused monumental disruptions in education. School districts nationwide are expanding their summer programs and offering bonuses to get teachers to take part.

Under the most recent federal pandemic relief package, the Biden administration is requiring states to devote some of the billions of dollars to summer programs.

The U.S. Education Department said it is too early to know how many students will sign up. But the number is all but certain to exceed the estimated 3.3 million who went to mandatory or optional summer school in 2019, before the pandemic.

In Montgomery, Alabama, for example, more than 12,000 of the school system’s 28,000 students signed up before the June 1 deadline. Typically, about 2,500 go to summer school. Philadelphia had enrolled 14,700 by Friday and was expecting more for the mostly in-person programs, up from the 9,300 students in last summer’s all-virtual sessions.

“It’s an understatement to say the needs are greater this year,” said Kalman Hettleman, an education policy analyst in Maryland.

Hettleman worries most about the reading skills of disadvantaged younger students who were falling behind even before COVID-19 closed schools and were likely to encounter technological hurdles afterward.

“It’s not realistic to think that summer school, no matter how good and intense, will close all the gaps because many of these kids had gaps before the pandemic,” said Hettleman, who wants to see sessions mandatory for low-performing students in Baltimore. “But it will help, and it will at least give them a fighting chance if there are intense interventions during the regular school year.”

Las Vegas high school freshman Taylor Dennington never thought she would be in summer school, but there she was starting last week — along with plenty of friends — after a year of remote learning.

“This year was such an unmotivating school year,” she said.

“It got to the point where I wasn’t doing ANY work, I was just going to class,” Dennington, who is taking biology and math, said in a text exchange. “I learn better in school than online. Being in a classroom where a teacher is present is so much better than waiting hours for an email back from your teacher.”

School systems must devote some of the federal funding to deal with COVID-19’s disproportionate effect on students from poor families, those whose first language is not English, members of minority groups and those who are homeless or in foster care.