Summer enrollment is typically low, and NC school districts are trying to change that this year

North Carolina educators have just weeks to go before they begin their biggest-ever summer learning programs, serving potentially hundreds of thousands of students at risk of not moving up to the next grade level.

Summer school presents an opportunity for students affected by COVID-19 pandemic learning disruptions. It also presents a challenge for North Carolina school districts to implement a wide-scale summer school, after years of reports and research have shown low enrollment and underwhelming outcomes for prior summer reading camps.

Educators are planning ways to make summer school more engaging, while working to convince students to enroll. They emphasize that the brief, 150-hour summer school will yield noticeable, if not always measurable, social and academic benefits.

How well districts’ new engagement efforts and acerbated and targeted learning techniques work will inform future summer schools and COVID-19 intervention.

“We want to use this as a learning opportunity, not only for kids but for us,” said Michael Maher. Maher is the first director of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s new office of learning recovery and acceleration.

The expanded summer learning programs stem from a new state law, SL-2021-7, passed earlier this spring to require every traditional public school district to offer summer learning for “at-risk” students in kindergarten through 12th grades.

Encouraging enrollment

Reports on the Read to Achieve summer camps show enrollment in them isn’t a given, even when students face the prospect of not advancing to the next grade level.

WRAL requested the annual Read to Achieve camp reports from the Department of Public Instruction to see how often attendance-optional summer programs are used and asked state and local officials how this year’s programs can be more enticing to parents, guardians and students.

In the state’s largest school district, the Wake County Public School System, Read to Achieve enrollment has hovered around half of those eligible.

“We want definitely a better turnout than that number,“ said Syreeta Smith, the district’s senior director of elementary school programs. The district plans to narrow the focus of its curriculum and communicate to students and families how what they’re learning will help them as students continue their education.

Plus, it will be “fun” and “engaging,” Smith said, echoing the words of educators across the state who are trying to market their summer schools.

By the end of Monday, the school district had surpassed enrolling half of those invited; nearly 17,000 students of the roughly 23,000 students invited had signed up.

Each year, thousands of North Carolina students who have fallen behind in school pass on their school district’s Read to Achieve camps, designed to help them gain ground before the next academic year starts.

In 2018 — the latest year of available reported data — less than half of the 30,904 children invited to the camps enrolled in them. While 13,489 attended, 17,415 skipped it. Just 3,228 students ended up reading proficiently by the end of the 72-hour camp. That’s about one for every 10 students whom educators said needed the camp’s reading intervention.

For educators, the need to take make summer school seem like a can’t-miss opportunity this time around is clear.

“I do think it’s about re-engaging kids, it’s about getting them excited about learning, it’s about providing them some diverse opportunities and maybe discovering some hidden talents,“ Maher said.

So educators have devised plans to make summer learning engaging and appealing, while touting that they’ll provide transportation and meals.

In the past, educators say, many families may have skipped out on summer learning because the Read to Achieve camp was located too far away from their home or because they didn’t feel it was worth attending if they couldn’t attend all of the brief, 72-hour camp.

Education leaders in North Carolina hope the expansion of learning sites and the extended period of the summer programs will encourage more enrollment. In some districts, they’ll hold all-day school, until the evening, or have childcare on-site to reduce caregiving or transportation issues for families.

When it comes to encouraging attendance, educators plan to make their pitch as often as possible, mailing invitations and following up with phone calls to families who haven’t responded. They’re hoping targeted academic intervention, enrichment activities and school re-engagement will be sufficient appeal for enrollment and regular attendance.

Smith believed allowing fifth and eighth graders to learn at their new schools would be an incentive for students to sign up for summer school. And since all grade levels will be eligible, siblings could end up attending, if they’re all eligible.

Bladen County Schools leaders have been pushing to enroll more than 1,000 students identified for the summer program, and Superintendent Jason Atkinson is aiming for more than the 60% he says his district normally pulls in for Read to Achieve summer camps. The district is doing letters, phone calls and marketing on flyers and social media.

“We know that we’ve got needs that have got to be met, and we’re hoping that we have a big number of students to turn out so that we know that we’re making an impact,” Atkinson said.

Shaping the summer programs

Some research has shown summer schools in North Carolina and elsewhere to mostly have little impact on student achievement or testing.

But academics have made several suggestions for improving and conducting summer learning, based on their findings.

A North Carolina State University report in 2018 estimated only small effects from the 72-hour Read to Achieve summer camp on students’ test scores.

“Summer reading camps should be redesigned to reflect more realistic expectations and to offer more intensively diagnostic instruction in specific areas that can, over the long term, improve overall reading performance,” researchers recommended. Further, summer programs should only be part of schools’ intervention offerings, especially if low attendance in reading camps is because of logistical challenges for families that are unique to summer, researchers wrote.

A 2020 review of 19 studies on voluntary summer learning programs found little benefit from many but some positive impact from a couple of programs. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, East China Normal University and Chinese University of Hong Kong noted that two summer reading camps with success focused on phonics, reading comprehension and writing and had small group tutoring. But one summer program that also focused on phonics, and which used college students to teach, wasn’t successful, largely because of poor attendance among those who had signed up for it. Those who actually attended, however, when compared to the control group, did better. Researchers suggested interventions during the normal school year as possibly more effective and less costly than summer school.

A RAND Corporation study of summer programs in five school districts — Boston, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Rochester, N.Y., and Duval County, Fla. — found lasting benefits of summer school only among students who had high attendance. Researchers urged school districts to focus on ensuring regular attendance as a part of conducting the summer programs.

In North Carolina, educators are planning for academic interventions beyond summer school, and they emphasize that summer school isn’t just about bumping up test scores by a few points.

This year’s summer school is a chance to innovate, Maher said. What districts try, and what works and what doesn’t, will help inform future summer or other supplementary learning. Summer school is also an opportunity to re-energize children’s minds, re-engage them with learning and bridge one school year to the next.

“This isn’t about end-of-grade test scores,” he said. “That’s not what’s is about that’s not what summer school is about. Summer school is bigger than that.”

Students, especially those who have been learning remotely all year, will need to re-adjust to the social and academic aspects of traditional school, he said.

Maher is less than two months into a job both new to him and to North Carolina — director of the Department of Public Instruction’s first office of learning recovery and acceleration.

He and his staff have held dozens of meetings with school districts, going over what the districts are required to do, per the new state law, for summer school, as well as the most effective ways to offer it.

Students’ re-emergence into more routine academic life may not yield overnight learning gains. Rather, getting students closer to grade level standards and beyond will be a gradual process, continuing into the next academic year for many students, or longer.

Summer learning won’t just be an added challenge for students, but for educators, as well. They’ll be tasked with teaching the state’s most vulnerable students, nearly exclusively, and planning to do so in a more intensive way than ever before.

School districts have not necessarily offered robust summer learning in they way they plan to this summer. They have offered the state-required Read to Achieve summer camps for the youngest learners or credit recovery for high school students, and perhaps nothing else.

This year, school districts will have summer learning for all grades, kindergarten through 12th grade.

The basics of every summer school program this year are: fully in-person instruction; 150 learning hours or 30 days of school; math and English for kindergarten through second grade students; math, English and science for third through eighth grade students; an enrichment activity, to be decided by the school, such as arts or physical education programming, for kindergarten through eighth grade students; and all classes with end-of-course exams and at least one elective class for high school students.

Schools will have staff on hand to assist with students “social and emotional” needs, if they’re stressed out or otherwise struggling.

Meals, transportation and physical activity won’t count toward the instructional hours.

Districts are largely combining their Read to Achieve summer camps, and any other summer learning they’ve previously had, with their upcoming summer programs.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s legislation, SL-2021-7, lays out much of this. It also emphasizes an atmosphere attractive to students and their families.

The legislation requires districts to recruit students and families through messaging on academic offerings but also “by offering a fun, positive environment with enrichment activities to counteract the negative impacts from COVID-19 on student social interactions and development.”

And that’s something educators want to highlight, too: Summer school this year will have a splash of summer camp feel.

“I would love to see these summer programs not look like school,” said Dennis Davis, an assistant professor of education at NC State University.

Enrichment programs could be learning an entirely new skill or a new way of applying existing skills, Maher said. That could be teaching math in the mornings and then coding — also a logic-heavy activity — in the afternoon, he said.

In Wake County, students will be in school during normal hours, focusing on core courses for longer blocks of time than a typical school day.

Fifth and eighth grade students will do summer school at their new middle school and high schools to help them transition to the next year, said Smith, the director of elementary programs.

The Wake County Public School System plans to have class sizes as small as 18, with small groups of four to six students for more targeted learning, Smith said.

Instruction will have a narrower focus of standards to master, she said. For example, young children learning to read would spend extra time on phonics and word decoding.

Bladen County Superintendent Jason Atkinson wants his school district’s enrichment programming to be hands-on and focused on STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. He’s partnered with 4-H and is looking at working with more groups.

The Bladen County program will last four weeks, beginning June 7, with longer-than-usual school days.

Districts officials have been planning their summer program, in part, through a shared Google Doc of ideas.

Managing expectations

Summer school can help students make incremental gains, said Dennis Davis, an NC State associate professor of education. Those gains might not be easily seen on big standardized tests, he said, but summer school is only a short-term program.

Davis recommends schools tap into students’ interests when teaching, if they don’t already, such as teaching reading using stories about space exploration.

“I think they would be more effective if they weren’t just more of the same, and I don’t mean that as a critique of schools,” which have done incredible work during the pandemic, Davis said. “But I don’t know that kids need more of the same. They need something different. They need something more intensive. They need something more customized to their individual needs”

Children will be tested at the beginning of summer school and at the end, as a measure of their progress through the summer.

Fine-tuned measurements of specific skills, like whether a student learning to read has a good grasp of phonemic awareness, will be better indicators of student progress, Davis said. Students will benefit from summer school, but parents shouldn’t expect huge changes, he said.

“Summer school is not a silver bullet,” Maher said. “Six weeks of summer school is not going to cure all of the ills of more than year. I think one of the important pieces of this summer school is to help students re-engage with school.”

Parents and students should expect growth, Smith said, and hopefully a smoother transition to the next grade level.

“Parents are going to have to be realistic in their expectations because it is a short, six-week period,” Smith said, “but because we’re being very intentional, we expect kids to show growth in the prioritized standards we’ve identified.”

By Oct. 15, per the new state law, schools must report to the Department of Public Instruction how many students who participated in the summer program progressed to the next grade level and how many were retained.

Whether a student ultimately progresses to the next grade level is a decision made by educators and parents. Students not meeting the mark often progress anyway because of concerns about the impact of separation from their classmates on students’ social and emotional skills learning. Those can sometimes outweigh worries about the students’ ability to catch up.

The state’s Read to Achieve program seeks to curb “social promotion” by getting more students on grade level, although the research shows it hasn’t been as successful as hoped.

Non-promotion to the next grade level is relatively rare for children in intermediate and middle grades, according to North Carolina Department of Public Instruction data.

For the 2018-19 academic year, 2.5% of students, or more than 34,000, weren’t promoted. That was 3.7% of kindergartners, 3.1% of first graders, 1.5% of second graders and less than 1% of third through eighth graders. It was 8.7% of ninth graders, 5.4% of 10th graders, 3.8% of 11th graders and 2.3% of 12th graders.

Those figures are fairly consistent with other recent years, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data don’t include charter schools or factor in students who disenroll.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentages were a bit worse, although the pattern among grade levels remains consistent.