At a press conference in Woonsocket today, the Rhode Island Afterschool Plus Alliance (RIASPA) and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation announced support for five programs that will provide young Rhode Islanders with enriching, summer learning opportunities that will be both fun and educational. Seven hundred fifty children and youth will participate in five programs located in Providence, Woonsocket, Central Falls and Pawtucket.
Governor Donald L. Carcieri and new Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist were on hand to announce the programs, highlight their important role in the development of young people, and address the issue of summer learning loss. Support for the programs is an example of the increasing awareness of the importance of summer learning on the development and achievement of learners.
The five programs, the Providence After School Alliance; Connecting for Children and Families (Woonsocket); SCOPE 21st Century Community Learning Center/Central Falls School District; Pawtucket School Department Child Opportunity Zone; and the Boys and Girls Club of Pawtucket, will serve as demonstration sites for creating a comprehensive system that connects school, community-based enrichment and experiential programming in order to mitigate summer learning loss.
“These programs are unique because they are purposely designed to increase partnerships between community-based organizations and schools.” said Sarah Cahill, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Afterschool Plus Alliance (RIASPA). “We know that students get more out of a program when the program curriculum is closely aligned with the school. These programs will identify best practices for increasing those partnerships.”
A good example of collaborating together to align the work of both the program and the school district is the summer program run by the Providence After School Alliance (PASA) and the Providence Public School Department. PASA and the district have aligned their program schedule so the school department’s remediation program and PASA’s afternoon experiential learning and recreation program are scheduled together and school faculty will join PASA’s program providers to jointly run science, math and literacy programs. The program will focus on intensive project–based learning in the sciences, math and the arts, co-taught by school-day teachers and community based providers.
Governor Carcieri gave strong support for the programs. He spoke about the benefits of the programs such as a wide diversity of activities for the children and youth. Everything from theater and karate to community service projects. “The experiences our children and youth will have in this program will last a lifetime,” said Governor Carcieri. “Not only will they be better prepared for the next school year, they will make memories of summer that every child and youth should have.”
As the Nellie Mae Education Foundation report, The Learning Season reveals, students from low-income families lose about two months of grade level equivalency in math and reading over the summer which leads to a growing achievement gap between lower and higher income students over the years. These programs will address that gap and summer learning loss by providing high-quality academic and enrichment programming infused with traditional summer activities.
“Summer learning is a much more important part of education than most people think.” said Nellie Mae Education Foundation President & CEO Nicholas C. Donohue. “We’re excited to support these programs and the important partnerships behind them in order to provide learners with vital enrichment opportunities and to ultimately begin the conversations that need to take place around how we organize schooling.”
New Education Commissioner Deborah Gist commented on the importance of the summer months, saying, “Learning happens throughout the year, not just when school is in session. Summer should be an important learning time and these programs will identify best practices around summer learning. What we learn from these programs is invaluable as we move ahead to support and improve education in Rhode Island.”
The five summer learning programs were each awarded $60,000 by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. RIASPA manages the programs with the Foundation’s support. RIASPA will provide training and technical assistance and evaluation of the demonstration programs. The grants are an outgrowth of work RIASPA did on an initiative called Supporting Student Success (S3). One of the recommendations of S3 is to identify practices and policies that lead to high-quality summer learning programs. RIASPA and Nellie Mae have formed an active partnership to identify the best practices for summer learning and share them with policymakers, educators, and the general public.
The main objective of the programs is to provide students with a supportive, nurturing, engaging, and challenging environment to maintain, and/or increase their skills and allow students to demonstrate proficiencies that are based on their grade level expectations. By way of example, at the Pawtucket Child Opportunity Zone program, middle school students will produce a product that will demonstrate proficiencies and is portfolio worthy. The students will have the opportunity to collaborate with each other, think critically about a topic, explore it in depth, develop and investigate probing questions, and report on it both orally and in writing. This will be an invaluable opportunity for students entering 7th and 8th grades to begin thinking about the high school graduation requirements and to use summer to incorporate these skills into their learning experience.
The programs start on various dates, the earliest starting on June 29. They generally run four to five weeks in July and August, 2009. For descriptions of the programs visit the “news and calendar of events” section of RIASPA’s website, www.afterschoolri.org.
The Rhode Island Afterschool Plus Alliance (RIASPA) is a statewide advocacy organization whose mission is to influence public policy to expand and support high-quality expanded learning opportunities, including afterschool and summer programs, so that Rhode Island’s children and youth are inspired to learn and grow, and prepared to lead productive lives. Founded in 2002, RIASPA is one of the 37 statewide afterschool networks funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Currently, RIASPA has a broad based network of over 500 individual members statewide from organizations ranging from direct afterschool and summer program providers, substance abuse task forces, school personnel, and state agencies, among others. The Rhode Island Afterschool Plus Alliance is currently housed at the United Way of Rhode Island, which is the fiscal sponsor and partner funder for RIASPA. www.afterschoolri.org
The Nellie Mae Education Foundation is the largest philanthropy in New England that focuses exclusively on education. The Foundation provides grants and other support to education programs and intermediary organizations in order to stimulate transformative change in public education systems and ensure that all New England's learners are prepared for success. The Foundation investigates, promotes and supports a greater variety of high-quality educational opportunities that enable all citizens-especially and essentially those from underserved populations-to obtain the skills, knowledge and supports necessary to become civically-engaged, economically self-sufficient, life-long learners. Since it was established in 1998, the Foundation has distributed nearly $98 million in grants. Currently, it primarily provides funding through five strategic initiatives: Early Learning, Pathways to Higher Learning, Time for Learning, Adult Learning, and Systems Building. www.nmefdn.org
