EDUCATION ENRICHMENT PROGRAMS AROUND COLORADO SPRINGS TAKE DIFFERENT APPROACH TOWARD FIGHTING LEARNING LOSS

from Back to School Guide 2022

COLORADO REPORT OUTLINES PANDEMIC IMPACTS ON STUDENTS HEADING TO COLLEGE

Monroe Elementary School assistant principal Katie Schoolmaster, right, looks on as students participate in small-group math instruction. Monroe was one of more than 35 district schools that participated in District 11’s Summer Bridge program. Photo by O’Dell Isaac, The Gazette

Summer learnin’

Education enrichment programs around Colorado Springs take different approach toward fighting learning loss

By O’Dell Isaac odell.isaac@gazette.com

Two years after a pandemic that turned bedrooms into classrooms, many Colorado Springs-area students are finally beginning to show signs of recovery from the learning loss that has plagued them since early 2020.

But thousands of students are still struggling to catch up, and officials warn that it could take years to close the learning and achievement gaps that were caused — or exacerbated — by COVID-19.

“This situation was created over a two-year period,” said Clint Allison, Fountain-Fort Carson District 8’s executive director of student achievement. “We’re not going to fix it in one or two summers. It’s going to take time.”

Students were hit hard, indeed.

National Public Radio reported that even students who spent the least amount of time learning

SEE SUMMER PROGRAMS • PAGE 4

Michael Lebo anxiously watches from the floor as he hopes that his robotic vehicle will make the turn that he programmed it to do. At Janitell Junior High School in the Widefield School District #3, students are spending a few days out of their summer building and programming robots. Photo by Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette.

SUMMER • FROM PAGE 3

remotely during the 2020-21 school year — a month or less — missed the equivalent of seven to 10 weeks of math learning, according to Thomas Kane of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

Previous summer enrichment programs have been mostly designed to mitigate the “summer slide” — the tendency for students to lose some of the academic gains they made over the course of the school year. The regression caused by the pandemic has made the slide worse, but officials said the solution is not to load kids up with a bunch of classes and homework over the summer.

“We don’t want to keep pouring instruction into a cup that’s already full,” Allison said.

With this in mind, several area school districts took a different approach toward summer courses, moving more toward enrichment than credit recovery.

District 11’s Summer Bridge program was created to meet a specific need as educators identified which kids continued to struggle post-COVID, and worked to convince families that additional instruction was necessary, officials said.

Enrollment was not mandatory, but the process led to some frank and sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

“We contacted families and told them we really needed their child in this program, and we told them why,” said Sherry Kalbach, D-11’s interim superintendent for instruction and curriculum. “We needed them for the full four weeks in order for them to receive the greatest benefit.”

Because Summer Bridge was voluntary, its success was largely dependent on lessons being interesting and fun, particularly at the lower grades, said Katie Schoolmaster, assistant principal at Monroe Elementary School. So instructors were careful to mix fun activities and physical movement with traditional classroom learning.

“A lot of the program’s success depends on kids going home to their parents and saying, ‘I learned a lot, I had fun today, and I need to go back tomorrow’,” Schoolmaster said.

Widefield School District 3’s Summer Engagement Academy offered more than 70 classes on a wide variety of disciplines including play writing, floor installation, painting, cooking and rocketry. The program, launched last year, was designed to enhance academic and critical thinking skills as well as to get students excited about going to school.

SEE SUMMER • PAGE 6

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“What we’ve seen and heard … is that it has been a productive summer for kids, and they’ve gotten something out of the effort that they’ve put in.”

— Clint Allison, executive director of student achievement, Fountain-Fort Carson District 8

SUMMER • FROM PAGE 4

“It’s an opportunity for kids to reengage in a fun way,” said district spokeswoman Samantha Briggs.

Fountain-Fort Carson District 8’s Summer Learning Institute focused mostly on credit recovery or credit advancement, but the district launched two enrichmentbased partnership this summer, Allison said.

Camp Invention is a weeklong STEM immersion program run by the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame. The full-day program filled all available slots “within maybe 30 minutes,” Allison said.

A weeklong program at Florissant Fossil Beds in Teller County was also highly popular.

“What this tells us is that we need more opportunities for students to learn while exploring areas of passion,” Allison said.

At least two area districts offered their students a program that could allow new students to hit the ground running for the fall semester.

District 11 and Manitou Springs School District 14 are offering August programs called “Jump Start.” Although they share a name and a purpose, their availability and approaches are markedly different.

Manitou Springs’ program is for incoming 1st- through 5thgraders and is two weeks long, running from July 25 – Aug. 5. The program uses a summer-camp vibe to reconnect students to the classroom, officials said.

D-11’s Jump Start initiative is designed to help new kindergartners, 6th-graders and 9th-graders an on-ramp to ease the sometimes difficult transition to an elevated level of instruction.

Typically, middle school and high school newcomers get a day to orient themselves before the school opens up to the rest of the student body. That’s not always enough time, Kalbach said.

“We know those transition points are hard for kids,” she said. “Moving from fifth grade to sixth, or from eighth to ninth, is a big transition, socially and academically. If we can get sixth graders to spend a week bonding with their teachers, learning how middle or high school works, we think we’ll see better social, emotional and academic transitions.”

District officials say the battle against learning loss is likely to be more of a marathon than a sprint. But local educators said they are encouraged by what they saw over the summer.

“What we’ve seen and heard from our students and our instructional staff is that it has been a productive summer for kids, and they’ve gotten something out of the effort that they’ve put in,” Allison said.

“We’re pretty excited to see what the data looks like at the end of this,” Kalbach said. “You can’t re-teach a whole school year in four weeks, but we can see some growth, and I think we are going to see some pretty solid growth in literacy and math from the kids who participated in this program.”