Washington Post Staff Writer
Summer can be the enemy of the schoolteacher: Students forget their math. They stop reading. And in the case of those with limited English skills, they lose their newly acquired words.
So at 22 elementary schools in the poorest enclaves of Montgomery County, summer ended early.
One recent morning, Jennifer Barrett, a kindergarten teacher at Sargent Shriver Elementary School in Silver Spring, handed out sandwich bags containing random numbers of classroom knickknacks: four glue sticks, five pencil sharpeners, six dominoes.
"All right, we are going to be doing some counting. Are you ready?" she asked the students. "Now remember, put them in a line so you're ready to count them."
A boy counted his glue sticks -- "I've got one, two, three, four!" -- and smiled.
Classes don't officially start until Aug. 27, but in each of the past six years, elementary schools serving Montgomery's high-poverty neighborhoods have opened in July to give students an early start: free breakfast and lunch and three hours of academics every weekday for four weeks, supplemented by afternoon arts, physical education and all the activities other children are getting at summer camps and on family vacations.
"We re-create the school system for four weeks," said Chrisandra Richardson, director of academic support initiatives for Montgomery schools.
The effort, which research shows has helped improve test scores, reflects changing attitudes about the role of summer school. Most of the nation's schools still operate, researchers say, under a tradition-bound view of summer as catch-up time for students at risk of repeating a grade. But a growing number of school systems are embracing a new approach to summer study -- as an opportunity to close the achievement gap before it opens.
The Montgomery program, called Extended Learning Opportunities -- Summer Adventures in Learning, is considered a national model for stemming the summer brain drain. Students who faithfully attended the first summer session in 2002 tested better in reading and math after summer school than before, according to research.
Among 12 schools that participated in the program continuously from 2002 to 2005, second-grade reading scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills rose an average of 12 points, from the 44th to the 56th percentile. The school system as a whole showed a nine-point gain, from the 64th to the 73rd percentile.
Other Washington area school systems have launched similar programs.
In Charles County, more than 2,100 students just finished four-week voluntary summer academies, programs offered across the grades and centered on reading and math. Launched in 1998, the academies offer a camp-like setting in elementary grades, with an emphasis on technology in middle school and on the High School Assessment exit exams in the upper grades.
Three schools with high poverty levels in St. Mary's County offer a four-week Eleven Month School Program, now in its fourth year. The program offers full-day instruction to 360 students in reading, math and enrichment activities.
Enrollment in the Montgomery summer session is 4,666, or a little more than half of the 9,109 students attending the eligible schools. The $2.5 million program is offered at all schools covered by the Title I federal poverty program, which offers extra money to Montgomery elementary schools where at least 56 percent of students qualify for meal subsidies. Classes started July 9 and end Friday.
The summer program has become so routine that some parents have come to consider it the official start of the school year, an impression school officials do not discourage. Kindergartners and their parents don their finest clothes for the start of classes.
"We had criers the first few days," said Richardson, who administers the program.
Teachers who go back far enough to remember the years before the summer program say the youngest students, in particular, are now much better prepared for the start of regular classes.
Before the advent of summer study, "they didn't know things like where the bathroom was, how to line up for the cafeteria, sitting in a circle," said Diane Mohr, a former kindergarten teacher who works with Richardson. "You'd lose a good two to three weeks of instruction."
Researchers followed Baltimore students from first grade to adulthood, tracking their progress on tests taken at the start and end of each academic year.
"Children whose parents are college-educated, they continue to build their reading skills during the summer months," said Karl Alexander, a Hopkins sociology professor involved in the research. "You go to a museum or you go to a library or you go to the science center, and through osmosis you make some headway there."
Low-income children actually keep pace with more affluent students during the academic year but slip behind during the summer, for lack of books to read, museums to visit and generally "unequal summer learning opportunities," said Brenda McLaughlin, director for research and policy at the Center for Summer Learning at Hopkins, which is devoted to erasing the achievement gap.
At Sargent Shriver Elementary, the reading and math losses are compounded by language losses. More than half of the students are learning English as a second language. Those pupils spend much of the summer in neighborhoods where only Spanish is spoken, and they forget some of the English they've learned in school.
But progress was evident after just eight days in Barrett's summer classroom. From the start of classes, she had asked her students daily to write their names on large sheets of paper, and she posted each one on the wall. The sheet from the first day was an illegible tangle of letters. By day eight, the names were written in a straight line and, for the most part, correctly spelled.
"Let's help Richard count how many letters in Jonathan's name," Barrett told the class. The students counted aloud, reached eight and kept right on going. At 10, the teacher politely stopped them.
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