Expanded summer school programs will focus on emotional, academic gaps caused by COVID – NorthJersey.com

North Jersey schools will use federal COVID funds to expand summer programming and get students ready for a return to full in-person learning in the fall.

But this summer, the emphasis for schools will be on social interaction and engagement over academic learning, said administrators in Paterson and Garfield, school districts where high positivity rates kept students fully remote for most of the last 15 months. 

Garfield schools were remote until early March. In Paterson, students learned virtually until June 8. Both districts, along with the rest of the state, shut schools in March 2020. Their summer programs began on June 28 and will go until the end of the month.

In nearby Clifton, where students had a hybrid schedule — a combination of remote and in-person — the focus is still on academics, but summer programs have been similarly expanded. Two hundred additional students will receive summer lessons this year to be paid with federal funds, said Assistant Superintendent Janina Kusielewicz. The extra students will join the 700 who attend summer classes during a typical school year.

“We’ve had to rearrange our priorities this summer,” said Anna Sciacca, superintendent of Garfield Public Schools. “We’re still using New Jersey’s learning standards as guidelines, but we have structured our programs differently this year to emphasize enjoyment.”

This means that in addition to academic enrichment, Garfield’s high school students get yoga and fitness classes, middle schoolers are being offered theater and horticulture, and elementary students get to choose from classes called Sherlock Holmes, Around the World and City of Garfield.

Programs for elementary-aged children are project-based, theme-based and game-based. “We want to make sure the kids want to be here and that they’re having fun,” Sciacca said.

Schools aren’t just flush with funds to beef up summer programming; they have a mandate to do so.

A  law enacted in March and sponsored by Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), requires all state public schools to provide summer programs that mitigate learning losses suffered during the pandemic. The acting commissioner of the state Department of Education has directed schools to use federal emergency relief funds “to streamline, prioritize, and personalize summer experiences based on intimate knowledge of their students,” in an open letter that she issued to educators in May.

New Jersey schools received $310 million from the CARES Act,  $1.2 billion from the CRSSA Act and a portion of a slated $2.8 billion from the ARP (American Recovery Plan), confirmed a spokesperson for the department of education, referring to the three aid packages the federal government has released since the pandemic began.

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Paterson resident Yas Butler agrees that activity and socialization are more important than grades this year.

“I’m happy it’s over,” she said, referring to schools being remote for so long. She sounded relieved that her third grader chose the full-day summer camp at the local Boys and Girls Club over the school’s half-day summer enrichment programs.

“They need to be active. With COVID, they were home, gaining weight, eating snacks all day,” she said. Virtual school was tough on her and her son, even though he received good grades. “It was kind of good and kind of bad; teachers were teaching but parents had to be very hands-on,” Butler said.

Paterson’s unique challenges — with a high poverty rate where nearly all of its 24,000 students qualify for free meals — required the summer program to cater to emotional and social setbacks, along with academic enrichment.

“The Paterson schools saw many children lose a parent or a grandparent. I had one child lose both parents,” said Eileen Shafer, superintendent of schools. “We want to make sure we’re having conversations with the children, especially the ones who don’t have much to say because they have lost a parent, or, are simply fearful.”

New to Garfield and Paterson’s summer programs this year are counselors and social workers. Their services in Paterson will be available going into fall, said Shafer.

Erin Jaeger runs a middle-school math summer program in Garfield. She said she received a list from her supervisor on topics where the children will need more instruction. “We’re using hands-on manipulatives to teach seventh-grade topics that the kids had trouble with, and for eighth graders to preview,” she said, referring to classes designed to address gaps in learning, and to prepare students who need enrichment for the new school year.

Designing programs that address losses in learning requires assessment and data, said nonprofit education watchdog, JerseyCAN. “The data should inform the instruction,” said its executive director, Patricia Morgan.

JerseyCAN reported 30% learning loss in English language arts and 36% in math, after looking at performance data for students in grades 3-8, collected from diagnostic tests conducted by 15 schools during the first half of the school year in 2020.

Low-income Black and Latino students suffered the most losses in learning, the study found. These findings were echoed in a memo released by the state in June, after it conducted its own assessment of how students performed academically during the second half of 2020.

But New Jersey waived all standardized assessments last year, and schools were left to their own means to collect data. How this has impacted summer programming remains unclear.

Paul Brubaker, a spokesperson for Paterson Public Schools — where 67% of the population is comprised of Latinos, according to the district’s annual report — said that it has only been using informal data, collected through interactions with students and parents throughout last year, to guide the design of summer programming after the pandemic.

He confirmed that the district will be taking the first formal assessments of students’ learning since the pandemic began, in September.

Administrators in Garfield and Clifton said their schools did not see significant changes in math or English advancement compared to previous years. Both school districts saw most children rise to the challenge of using technology during remote learning, a skill they intend to foster when schools reopen in the fall.

But in the dull, long days of summer—even a summer as unusual as this one, and as schools find their way back to long-hoped-for normalcy — educators and parents agree that engaging students is the priority.

“We recognize that there is learning loss,” said Sciacca, “but we feel that summer is not the time to make the students feel inadequate. The pandemic forced us to rethink what we offer in the summer and bring them back to school with a really positive spin.”

Kusielewicz said she was disappointed with the number of students who enrolled for camp, given that the school was ready to accommodate anyone who needed it. “We really thought more families would be taking advantage at this time, but I think a lot of families are simply tired,” she said.

“It’s too much school, they’ve been doing virtual school all year long,” said Paterson parent Bianca Canosa, an essential worker at Paterson’s Municipal Courthouse. She said she did not enroll her daughter, Leila, at the public school summer program because she wanted to give her child a break from academics. 

“After the pandemic, I just want her to relax, have fun and meet different people. I don’t want to stress her out,” she said.