HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — The Hillsborough County School District has designated $34 million to fight summer learning loss.
The district is offering reading programs, summer learning academies, summer schools, tutors, and different kinds of educational camps.
“We have learning opportunities for our students, from elementary, middle, and high school,” said Hillsborough County School District Superintendent Addison Davis.
Summer learning loss, also known as the summer slide, is when students return to school at a lower grade level because they don’t actively engage in educational activities during the break.
School officials stress this is something that happens every year nationwide. However, they’re trying to prevent it from happening this summer too.
“It’s not over; it’s real. And we’ve got to do everything we can to be able to address it,” said Davis.
Leaders are seeing it get worse, with lingering learning loss still present from the pandemic.
“We’re working diligently to be able to overcome that. So many core competencies and skills were lost during that time. We’re still having to be able to face exposure to grade level curriculum, grade level standards and standards that particularly may not have been exposed to while students were out. Because remember, students could’ve been out for 18 months at this particular time,” said Davis.
The district is fighting to get students up to speed, hoping to make up for some of the pandemic slide this summer.
“The pandemic has really exacerbated the achievement gap, and we currently see that today still when we look at how our students related to, looking at first graders when the pandemic started, or kindergarteners when the pandemic started to where they are now in third grade. There’s still a gap related to proficiency. So for us, we’re doing everything we can to make certain that students have access to high-quality content on a consistent basis,” said Davis.
For families who don’t want to enroll their children into any of the district summer programs, officials encourage them to do activities at home.
“There’s so many things that our parents can do, like taking students to a local library. They can have their students actively engage in some type of summer camps that we offer in the community and then also get our parents involved every single day to make certain that there’s organized time within the home that students are engaging with so many different content. Whether it be reading activities, hands-on inquiry-based activities, project-based learning activities. We want and need our kids engaged so that summer learning loss isn’t continuous,” said Davis.
