The annual , released last month from the , found that while there’s some bright spots nationally compared to 2019 — including a growing number of children covered by health insurance and a decrease in teen pregnancies — many states are struggling to take care of children, whether it’s the number of children living in poverty, a growing number of teen deaths or older students who are not in school or working.

“When we look at the overall numbers, we see a somewhat mixed picture,” said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, assistant director of P-12 policy at , a national education policy group and grantee to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “But, when we actually break it down by demographics, we see that there continues to be very large gaps between racial groups, in particular with Black and Latino students … [and their] educational outcomes.”

Nationally, there was improvement in seven of 16 indicators, the report found. Of the remaining measures, six worsened since 2019 and three remained the same. In almost all 16 categories, however, American Indian, Alaska Native, Black and Latino children fared worse than the national average. 

The report found education topped the list for the weakest rebound in recent years with continued declines in reading and math proficiency for all demographic groups between 2019 and 2024; and a smaller percentage of children attending preschool across the country. 

Using federal NAEP test data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the report found 70% of American fourth graders in 2024 were not reading on grade level, worsening from 66% in 2019 “[and] essentially undoing a decade of progress.” About 73% of eighth graders are not proficient in math either.

Black, American Indian, Alaska Native and Latino students saw widening gaps compared to the national average and their white and Asian peers. In 2024, for example, about 84% of Black fourth graders and 90% of Black eighth graders were not performing on grade level in reading and math respectively compared to 61% of white fourth graders and 63% of white eighth graders.

Nationally, high school graduation rates have increased by one percentage point to 87% between 2018-19 and 2021-22, but similar to proficiency, most students of color lag behind the national average by between four to 13 percentage points.

“This really is indicative of the fact that we’ve had generations and generations of disproportionate resources going to students,” Munyan-Penney said. “We know that students of color and from low-income backgrounds have continually seen less investment in their schools and communities, and that is really borne out here in the data.”

Children of color disproportionately lived in high-poverty areas in 2019-23, with around 20% of Black and American Indian or Alaska Native, followed by about 11% Latino children, who lived in areas of concentrated poverty compared to 3% for white, Asian and Pacific Islander children. 

Most states fund public schools through local property taxes, so there’s often a direct correlation between concentrated poverty and struggling student achievement, Munyan-Penney said.

Disparities also extended beyond education – particularly with the number of child and teen deaths per 100,000. 

From 2019 to 2023, the number of kids and youth who died between the ages of one and 19 per 100,000 children increased from 25 to 29, with cause of death mainly from accidents, homicides and suicides. That figure for Black youth is nearly double the national rate, with a 30% increase between 2019 to 2023, from 41 to 53 deaths per 100,000.

State-by-state child well-being has also been a moving target.

While New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts topped rankings for overall child well-being, Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico scored the lowest. The report acknowledged that despite overall rankings, some states “show vastly uneven scores across domains,” including Maine, which scored overall at No. 17, but simultaneously ranked No. 41 in education or North Dakota which ranked first in economic well-being, but No. 42 in education. 

“Strong performance at the state … level can mask the reality that millions of individual children are still struggling to access the resources,” the report said.

Federal investments toward healthcare coverage and economic stability during the pandemic were credited in the report as sources of improvement in parental employment and children covered under health insurance. 

About 25% of children had a parent who lacked stable employment between 2019 and 2023, which improved by one percentage point. The report found financial aid, including pandemic relief funds in 2020-21 and an expanded child tax credit, helped “strengthen family financial security.” The report also found an increase of children covered by health insurance from 5% in 2019 to 6% in 2023 was an “encouraging milestone.”

But, these gains may too be in jeopardy in upcoming years as several pandemic-era supports expired and President Donald Trump’s administration has recently made cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.

“The pullback in federal investment… is definitely a concern of mine,” Munyan-Penney said. “I’m not optimistic that these numbers will continue to go up unless we sort of see a change in the way that the federal government is approaching this and or we have very robust state investment.”

Scott Schmerelson, who has worked in the LA Unified School District for nearly four decades and has served on the board since 2015, was  by his board colleagues on Dec. 10.  

As board president, he succeeded , who is retiring.

A former LAUSD teacher, principal and administrator, Schmerelson assumed leadership of the board just before he begins his third and final term representing District 3, which covers parts of LA’s San Fernando Valley region.

In a phone interview, Schmerelson said he’d focus the board’s attention on fighting falling student enrollment in the remainder of the academic year, as pre-pandemic declines accelerated into long-term losses that may eventually force school closures.

“I’m going to constantly, constantly talk about enrollment,” Schmerelson said. “For the school district to remain viable, we have to have students.”

Schmerelson said he hoped LAUSD’s improving test scores would help attract students who may have left the district for private schools or home instruction.

He said as board president he’ll also focus on issues including LAUSD’s  and rising .  

It’s a tall order. But with nearly 40 years working in the district and close to a decade on the school board, Schmerelson believes he has the backing of his community.

As president, Schmerelson will help set the direction of the board’s policymaking and manage its operations. The LAUSD’s seven-member board sets the district’s policy, controls its budget and hires the superintendent.

This fall Schmerelson overcame an aggressive campaign from opponent Dan Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood, who focused much of his election messaging on the need to tame waste and corruption in the school district.

Chang and his backers, including the state charter school association’s political arm, spent more than $5.6 million promoting his campaign. �����󳾱��������Dz�’s backers, including the local teacher union, spent about $2.5 million, .

In the end, Chang landed behind Schmerelson with 48% of the vote, while Schmerelson got 52%.

Schmerelson brought up the cost of the race in remarks he made after he was sworn in as president at LAUSD headquarters last month.  

“Really, it is our whole community that won,” he said. “Because we learned to work together against the power of money. And when I say money, I mean $5 million.”  

The contest between the two men had the potential to tilt the district’s school board away from a majority of union-backed members, and impact its handling of several   facing LAUSD, including restrictions on charter schools’ use of buildings, which Chang said he’d move to reverse if elected. 

 victory is part of a successful election season for many teachers  in Los Angeles – and Schmerelson has aligned himself with local unions on policies limiting space and resources for charter schools.

But in an interview Schmerelson said he supports the continued operation of high-quality charter schools in the district.

“I am going to support those charter schools that are doing an excellent job of educating the kids,” said Schmerelson.

“I want to make sure that the charter schools that we have, are viable and working well,” he added.

“The thing that really struck us as we looked across all of the data points … [is] there’s just a disproportionate impact for those [special populations of] students across the board,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University.  “What I think really came through to us — especially in the parent interviews we conducted this year — was parents were experiencing a system that wasn’t functioning even before the pandemic effectively for them.”

At a press conference Tuesday, Lake called the report’s findings a “warning bell for systemic reform.” 

Disadvantaged students continue “bearing the brunt of slow and uneven recovery” from pandemic-era school closures, Lake said, and their struggles come at a time when their numbers are growing.

There was a surge of roughly 343,000 students identified for special education from the 2020–21 to the 2022–23 school years a trend which appears on track to continue. There are variations across states and student groups, with Black and Hispanic students being identified at higher rates.   

Lake said researchers are still trying to determine if this is just normal catch-up following under-identification during school closures, or if something more is going on.

The 2024 State of the American Student Report builds on two previous annual reports, which detailed the impact of COVID on students’ academic performance and well-being. Last year’s research focused on older students with little-to-no time left in the K-12 system, who saw what the organization described as “shocking declines” in college and career readiness. This year, CRPE interviewed parents and dug into data around particularly vulnerable student populations.

The academic impacts on students with disabilities and their rate of recovery varied from district to district, according to a CRPE-commissioned analysis by Georgia State professor Tim Sass. This, they believe, shows that what schools and districts did during and after the pandemic had real impact, but more research is needed to learn what kind of mitigation and recovery strategies proved most effective.

More than four years after COVID emerged, the average student who experienced school closures is still less than halfway to a , but Lake emphasized that averages can obscure particular students’ nuanced experiences. “Under the hood of average,” she said, she saw reason for both optimism and concern.

The good news: Students are bouncing back in some areas. The average student has recovered about of their pandemic-era learning losses in math and a quarter in reading.

Evidence-based practices, such as tutoring, high-quality curricula and extended learning time, are starting to get baked into school systems, she said, which she hopes will last beyond stimulus funds. 

Yet, many of these practices still aren’t reaching nearly enough students.

For example, across four major, urban public school systems in 2023, 8th graders with disabilities and English language learners continued to score significantly lower than their peers in English Language Arts. In New York City, 61% of all students demonstrated proficiency, while only 29% of students with disabilities and 9% of English learners did.

Chronic absenteeism also disproportionately plagues special populations, according to Sass’s analysis. And parents expressed frustration that during school closures their kids weren’t getting access to their legally required interventions. Simultaneously, they were concerned that expectations for their children were being lowered, while communication was dwindling.

“One of our researchers started referring to this as ghosting,” said Lake. “That the parents were being ghosted by their schools … [and] not getting information about how their kids were doing academically.” 

Ultimately, they felt blindsided when they found out just how far behind their children had fallen. As students have returned to school buildings, more have been flagged as having special learning needs and requiring special education, after a dip during the pandemic. 

Especially when looking at “COVID babies,” those who didn’t necessarily get access to preschool or typical socialization, Lake wondered, “Are they being funneled into special education as a solution or do they really have a disability that needs to be addressed in special education?” And, she added, “Is special education equipped to deal with this influx?”

CRPE’s analysis found that special education identification rates varied greatly across school districts in Massachusetts, which reports more detailed data than most other states. For example, the rate of identification in kindergarten in Boston grew from 14% to 18% between 2018 and 2024, while about an hour away in Worcester, the pre-K identification jumped far more, from 26% to 38%. Lake said this variation demonstrates that the approach to identification matters, but still “there are more questions than answers on this front.” 

Lake emphasized that while special populations may be struggling more acutely, many of the issues they face in the classroom are similar to those of their peers. 

“While we’re seeing a lot of kids moving into special education right now, maybe we need to flip the narrative and think about solving for the kids with the most complex needs,” she said. “And if we can figure out how to do that, making sure that all kids can be successful.”

The examines the causes driving the “astonishing” rates, resulting in bleak educational outcomes and disproportionately impacting Native, Black and Latino children. 

The national report, which explores social, health and economic factors across while also highlighting programs that work, paints a stark portrait of the state of child well-being. From a decline in the number of 3 and 4 year olds in school to an increase in the rate of child deaths, it warns the United States “stands on the precipice of losing our economic standing.” 

Without urgent, targeted investments in family engagement, social emotional health and tutoring, a generation of Black and brown kids may soon be shut out of fast growing, high-paying STEM fields, researchers say.

Today 2 in 5 or 40% of kids have experienced at least one of what experts call – trauma such as the loss of a parent from incarceration, divorce or death; housing or food insecurity; exposure to violence or substance use; and forms of abuse. In Mississippi and New Mexico, half of children experienced such trauma, according to 2021-22 data. 

“I think we should all be astonished that kids in this country are experiencing ACEs [trauma] at the rate that they are,” said Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs with the Casey Foundation, which has published data books on the state of childhood and funded related initiatives for more than 30 years. 

“We also know that post-pandemic, chronic absence is twice the level that it was before … it’s critically important that we understand what are the factors that are affecting kids as they enter the classroom and what’s preventing them from showing up for school.”

Alaska, Arizona, Washington D.C., and Oregon saw the highest chronic absenteeism rates, between 42 and 46%. Idaho, Louisiana, New Jersey and Washington saw the lowest, with between 4 and 18% of kids chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, the latest available data.

Several New England states that invest heavily in early childhood education — New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont – ranked highest in Kids Count’s latest annual state by state comparison for overall child well-being. Utah and Minnesota round out the top five, based off of 16 education, health, economic and family indicators. 

Beyond traumatic experiences, the data book points to rising economic or housing instability; limited or costly childcare options, which results in siblings caring for each other or working; and transportation challenges as common factors impeding children from attending school consistently. 

“What we’re seeing is many kids don’t have those basics met … Most of the country now accepts that we’re in a reading and literacy crisis but to break down, what does it actually look like and what does it mean? It is particularly alarming,” Boissiere said. 

While the report unveils some bright spots that will improve childrens’ well-being — an increase of kids who are insured and a decrease in the teen birth rate — the reality facing educators is that only one in three kids are reading at grade level by 4th grade.

One in four kids are proficient in 8th grade math. Racial breakdowns reveal alarming inequities: only 9% of Black kids, 11% of Native kids, and 14% of Latino kids are proficient.

Additionally, 54% of 3 and 4 year olds, roughly 4.3 million, are not in school, up from pre-2018 numbers, which has alarmed experts who point to the age as critical for mastering basic literacy and numeracy. The share is much higher for young Native and Latino children, 60% and 61% of whom are not in school, respectively. 

“The demographics of the public school system are only growing more and more diverse, so to ignore these disparities would really disservice most students in public schools,” Boissiere added.

Over $40 billion of federal pandemic relief funds for education remain unspent; states have until September 30 to allocate funds, which could be used through 2026. 

Authors urge every school to track absenteeism and invest in family engagement to better understand the challenges facing families in their particular context. They recommend implementing high dosage tutoring and point to the community school model, which offers wraparound physical and emotional health support alongside academics. 

, for instance, dropped its chronic absenteeism rate from 37 to 18% by investing strategies such as installing washer and dryers on campuses, rolling out a chatbot to address common questions about transportation and other barriers, and altering their automated call system to better track absenteeism and its causes.��

On one campus, a barber comes monthly to offer free haircuts. They’ve added additional van transportation for the coldest days to serve kids who don’t have adequate winter clothing, and launched a housing resource center to assist families experiencing homelessness who need support navigating local services.  

“It is going to take educators, administrators, parents and communities coming together,” Boissiere said, “to go back to hopefully better than pre-pandemic levels, make sure that kids are attending school regularly, and that they show up prepared to learn.” 

Currently being studied in a randomized trial at five high schools in and around Oklahoma City and bringing individualized help to 183 students since 2021, the rolled out at a critical moment.

Roughly according to the latest NAEP results, or the Nation’s Report Card — the . Oklahoma’s students scored 10 points below average, outperformed by 43 states. The state has also to fill vacancies.

Researchers high dosage tutoring as a powerful intervention for struggling learners. Beyond academic growth, it has the potential to boost feelings of belonging. A in particular can help students graduate high school, persist through college and earn more later in life. 

Yet many K-12 schools struggle to establish quality in-house tutoring, given the strain on finances and staff. High quality programs are costly, between ongoing training, reasonable compensation and research.

Now in its second year, the program at the University of Oklahoma has honed in on a local solution, looking to expand partnerships between universities and their surrounding K-12 schools.

“It’s going to be an everyday thing until we can catch up as many kids as we can and eliminate the issue altogether in the state,” said program director and veteran educator Cristina Moershel. 

Each tutor is paired with two students for a full 50-minute period, three days a week. They’re compensated $10,000 each year, split between scholarships and stipends.

Marcus Ake, a second year tutor studying meteorology, math and German, starts some periods off the page. He asks students, look around the room, what math do you see? From right angles on white boards to parabolas in desk chairs, “I just want to show everyone else that math is all around.”

Of the 9th grade students served by OU tutors, 42% more than doubled the average expected growth on the NWEA Map math test in just one semester. On average, students gained 3.41 points, over a point beyond the average 2.24. Scores for students at one school grew 8 points, about four times the average.

The jump is a big deal. Students are those most likely to not show huge gains, closing out 8th grade scoring in the 15-25th percentile. But if they continue at this rate, they will reach the 50th by the end of 9th grade. 

“They’re basically beating projections for students who are at the 50th percentile by a full point,” said Daniel Hamlin, professor and lead researcher for the project at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s actually really substantial.” 

Getting creative

Contrary to tutoring programs that support with homework help or replicate a lead teachers’ lessons, OU tutors fill foundational gaps in math that vary student to student. There’s no script: Tutors stop and start wherever students need, pulling a page from mastery instruction.

For many, the starting place is multiplying and dividing fractions, exponents and cubed roots. Others need a refresher on integers and adding like terms before they add variables to the mix. 

Tutors make games and songs for algorithms like the Pythagorean theorem, cut and color code paper to bring life back into what used to feel like confusing, irrational rules like the switch-flip method for dividing fractions.

It’s the individualized attention many wealthy families pay for. But for the hundreds of students now involved, many of whom are first generation or low-income Americans, the support wouldn’t be possible without it being free and during the school day. 

The Stephenson family, who , wanted to target instruction to the kids who most needed support and would not be able to afford it otherwise. Their interest piqued after reading research out of the University of Chicago and Saga Education, which shaped the foundations for OU’s program. 

Recruiting college students to tutor and mentor may also give students faster access to adults that look like them or relate to their life experiences. In the last two years, OU tutors represented 17 countries. This fall semester, 7% identified as Native American or American Indian, 15% as Asian, 15% as Black and 17% as Latino. 

And exposure to college students means exposure to college pathways. Most of the 158 tutors are working toward STEM, economics, or healthcare-related degrees, often able to share with students how they continue to use math everyday, or answer questions about what college actually looks like. 

For first semester tutor and computer engineering student Anurag Rajkumar Doré, the reality check includes breaking down the stigma or shame many kids feel about math. 

“I remember the first couple sessions. They wouldn’t even talk because they were afraid of getting the wrong answer. But I told them, ‘I don’t care if you have the wrong answer as long as you have the right reason,’” Doré said. 

“At the end of the day, math is more about understanding what’s happening than just memorizing steps…when you apply math to the real world, you’re not going to have a list of answers.”

First-time OU tutors go through a three day bootcamp at the start of the semester, learning a mix of pedagogical strategies while refreshing key math concepts. They attend weekly training for one to two hours, planning lessons and getting feedback from each other and veteran educators.  

Those involved say the high-quality training is a key ingredient for the model’s success. 

Doré sometimes messes up on purpose, so his two students see it as normal and practice explaining a different approach. He knows they hesitate with fractions, so naturally he gives bigger and bigger ones. Most recently, 180 over 360 times 35 over 35. The examples drive home the importance of simplifying first — math and many of life’s problems. 

The Initiative is one of three jobs he balances, but he never thinks about giving it up. Some days he feels he’s taught them more about confidence than math.

“I’m able to pay rent because of this program,” Dore said. “I can do all this and I can still help the community.”

Growing pains 

What started at two high schools has now grown to five — two rural, two midsize urban, and one large urban, all with their share of logistical hurdles and lessons learned. 

While the university picks up much of the financial and staffing hurdles, the model leans on high schools to get everyone on the same page so there’s no stigma or misinformation spread. Some parents were apprehensive, for instance, when their child qualified for tutoring.

“It may be that their child in eighth grade had an A in eighth grade math, but then they’re testing in the 20th percentile. Parents may say, ‘Well, my child is doing just fine,’ ” explained lead researcher Hamlin. “There’s a lot of communication that needs to be done with parents and schools and it has to be on an ongoing basis.”

The excitement tutors like Marcus Ake feel on day one is not always shared by students, either. One in particular was chronically absent, sometimes walking the halls. 

“The very first thing they said to me was ‘look, I know I’m bad at math. I don’t need you to tell me that,’ ” he said. 

Ake stressed the truth: “I’m not here for that… I’m literally here to hang out and do some math at the same time. This is low stress.” By the end of the semester, the student showed up every day, and asked if Ake would be there next semester.

Oklahoma has established an , but administrators told ����Ӱ�� a main draw of this partnership was the fact that it supports students within the school day. 

“You’re going to be really challenged to get kids to skip football practice, or not have their part time job or go home to take a nap,” said Chris Brewster, Superintendent for Santa Fe South schools.

Their high school, he said, was lucky — already offering a foundational math class for students who needed another dose. Accordingly, they didn’t have to hire an outside teacher of record or do any scheduling gymnastics to get kids enrolled.

Some school sites approached for the partnership declined, citing those very barriers. They couldn’t spare a teacher to supervise the period or didn’t want to take away student electives.

“These are very costly interventions. I can’t imagine at this point, if I had to bear that cost,” Brewster added. 

OU is gearing up for the long haul, to establish a center that will serve as a hub for high-dosage tutoring in the state. Talks with other universities have begun, including a March symposium to share training and funding resources, like local foundations, banks and national organizations.

On the research end, the University will look into how the program has affected discipline, attendance, tardiness rates and student GPAs, to publish early findings later this spring. Next year, they’ll study how effective a 3:1 student to tutor pairing can be.

Students say the tutoring is, “giving them confidence in math that they didn’t have before and that the relationship with their tutors is meaningful… something that makes them happy about being at school,” Hamlin added.

Other tutoring offerings often pair students with many instructors, and if virtual, can make it difficult for students to build trust and comfort. 

For Ake, who supports two students with completely opposite learning styles, the common denominator is a human one. They talk school drama, weekend plans, birthdays, track meets or whatever students bring up offhand during the period.  

“Showing an interest in their lives has gone a long way,” he said. “I can show them that I’m not just some stranger but I am someone who cares about them as well.”

Last month, by unanimous vote, the 78-year-old representative of Board District 5 was elected president of the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education. She last held the position in , before moving on to stints in city and state politics and academia. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Goldberg discussed both long-term and immediate difficulties facing the district, saying that negotiations with the unions representing LAUSD’s teachers and service workers would be resolved “in the next four to six weeks.” Her statements echo superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s recent promises of “a multi-year contract” that will “offset the pressure of inflation for all our workforce.”  

Goldberg must also lead the board in deciding how to spend the district’s $14.3 billion in a way that addresses the emotional and academic impacts of the pandemic and prepares for a future of declining enrollment and swelling costs. 

Goldberg spoke with ����Ӱ�� about these challenges, her goals for her one-year term as president, and her thoughts about superintendent Carvalho as he approaches one year on the job. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Are you confident that the budget you’re going to craft can accommodate demands from the labor unions? Let’s start with the service workers. 

…I am absolutely confident that we will conclude successful negotiations with all our bargaining units [including UTLA and SEIU Local 99], in probably the next four to six weeks — without any strikes or work stoppages… 

This board is very supportive of very good compensation packages because we know that the folks that have worked in our schools and in our offices have been through a lot of distress, and we want them to know that they are valuable to us and that they are the critical features of the district…There aren’t going to be any cuts to their benefits. That’s not where we’re looking. We need those people. The people at the schools are the only people who interact with children… 

All of those folks make schools a place of learning and safety for children and young people, and we’re not going to do anything, if we can possibly avoid it, that would lead to anybody thinking of, first, not working for us any longer, second, not helping us recruit for our vacancies, and third, for feeling the need for a work stoppage.

One thing the teachers are asking for is smaller class sizes. In order to achieve that, you would need to hire more teachers.

We’ve held class sizes down this whole year, with schools [that] lost enrollment not losing teachers unless they lost significant enrollment. So class sizes are actually smaller than they’ve been in recent years…I don’t think we will need to hire people to continue that because, unfortunately, in the entire state of California and in Los Angeles Unified, enrollment is declining. 

People are leaving because they can’t afford to live in the state. People are leaving because of immigration policies that have slowed immigration, which was a big part of our increase in population through the eighties and nineties and the beginning of 2000.

And also the birth rate in Los Angeles County is down considerably from what it has traditionally been. So all of those factors mean that we will have fewer students next year than we have this year…

Are you saying that natural demographic shifts will resolve that one point of tension between the district and the teacher’s union?

I doubt that it will ever resolve that point of contention. But I do think it will mean that the actual teaching experience for teachers in our system will be with significantly smaller class sizes than they have had when we were growing enrollment. 

I want to ask about enrollment decline. What is the board doing to make attending LA schools more attractive? 

It’s really done school by school, but we do a lot of things to make school more attractive. We have a very large sports program. We have a very large music program, and a growing music program. We have a very large arts program that is now beginning to grow again…We have festivals of cultural types all over the district. We have dual-language programs. We have programs with robotics. We have programs with STEM, we have programs with STEAM…

Are those making a dent in the enrollment decline?

I think so. We have a fairly significant number of schools in my board district with an increased enrollment this year. A lot of them in Southeast and South Gate. Huntington Park and Bell. Those schools are full and filling up. MACES Academy has a waitlist. Southeast Middle has a waitlist. 

There are different efforts being done regionally. There are different efforts being done at individual schools. And there are different efforts that the board is paying for, like extended transportation after school so that more students can participate in after school fun activities.

We’re coming up on a year since superintendent Carvalho came to the district. How would you say he’s doing?

Well, I think he’s doing pretty well. He will get a formal evaluation sometime in early February. We have a process we’ve developed and board members have been asked to review some materials and to rate him on certain issues, and all of that will be gathered at a closed session sometime in February…But I would say he has done some very important things very quickly. Certainly getting us a strategic plan, which the district has not had for many years…And very quickly when he came in, he set up ways to get feedback and information from the public…as well as staff…

He certainly has taken up the issues that are most important to this board, which are the social-emotional crisis in many of our schools, with many of our students, and some of our teachers. 

He also is pointing to real goals — specific, measurable goals in student achievement, and also how to support our personnel so they feel like this is the best place they ever wanted to work and to be able to help us recruit for still vacant positions… 

What are some areas for improvement for the superintendent?

I’m really not able to say that I have any at this moment…what he is doing is taking a look at not just the present, but the history and the future of this district…I have never seen a superintendent take a backward look at everything that has been going on as a way to understand how to move forward. 

It came out that [the cyberattack in September] started more than a month earlier than was disclosed by Carvalho…Is Carvalho trustworthy?

He’s trustworthy. He did what was necessary to protect this district. Making things public at a time earlier than he did would have endangered all of the efforts of the federal government, the state government, FBI, local police in trying to stop this. 

We are one of the very few districts that has been hit hard by this stuff that paid no ransom and managed very carefully to also protect all our payroll, for example. We lost nobody. They got no payroll information with all the Social Security numbers, for example. They got none of it. In fact, the only Social Security numbers they got were from the original place they broke in, which was Facilities. And that was with a few contractors.

There was some student information. Not Social Security numbers, but things like birth dates that were accessed. Right?

Yes. There were other smaller things — none of which, however, could prevent us from opening the schools, running the schools, paying people on time and appropriately. So I would say, considering what a terrible mess — and we’re not done with it, by the way. We still, every day, every week, every month have a series of checks that are being done…

I know a lot of one-time funding is going towards academic recovery efforts and there were these two acceleration days over winter break. Only about 9% of students in the district showed up. Do you see that as a success?

But about 65% of the ones that showed up were exactly the kids we were looking for. And we learned a lot. We learned that elementary kids are less likely to go to get help at a school they don’t regularly attend.

We learned that we should count on about half the students showing up — we figured that it would be 75% [of students who signed up]. We predicted wrong. In other words, we learn. So how we do the next two [acceleration days] in spring will be better.

How else should the district be tackling academic recovery in order to attract the students who didn’t show up for acceleration days?

We’re going to probably accelerate the amount of after school on your own campus with your own teacher support. That’s something we’re looking into for the following year. Saying…let’s see if we can do it two or three days a week all year long.

So, extended after school programs.

Extended after school, Saturday programs, additional teacher assistants we hope to hire to put into the classroom, so there’s a lower adult-to-student ratio. That makes for a lot of extra help for kids who are struggling. I spent 17 years teaching in Compton. I’m well aware of what it takes to make movement with kids who are struggling in school.

What about recovery for students with disabilities?…I’ve heard from a lot of parents and advocates that during [individualized education plan] meetings, the team is not bringing up compensatory education…Is that acceptable?

I have no idea if what you’re saying is accurate or not. So, without knowing that I can’t answer that question.

What specifically can the district be doing for students with disabilities, who are going to need way more than just some extra after school time?

Well, the [individualized education plan] will determine their individual needs and the district will meet them. That’s our goal. We don’t have any subordinate goal to that. We don’t say we’re going to try or anything else. We’re going to meet them. 

We had trouble meeting them [early in the pandemic] because, for example, all the kids that needed speech — most of the speech teachers went online. The parents didn’t want to do speech online. They wanted it in person, and we weren’t willing to require speech therapists to meet in students’ homes. So yes, they didn’t get it. You’re right. That was terrible. But it was a decision the parent made not to do that…

What we’re trying to do now is to overdose. So if [the students] were going to get [the services] once a week, we’re going to try to see if we can get it for them twice a week and things like that…

We’re going to try to figure out ways to deal with that loss, which has been extreme. No doubt.

How would you describe the district’s financial health?

Well, on the macro level, not good. On the micro level, fine. 

On the macro level, we, every year, spend more than we receive. And the two areas which bust our budget, is special education — which is about a billion dollars from the general fund that should not have to come from the general fund — and are benefits paid to retirees. Both the healthcare benefits that we pay to retirees and pension benefits that we pay part of and that the employee pays part of. Both of those put us in a long-term situation of having to ultimately…not be able to do what we have done for many, many decades, which is to pay the existing bills and to keep putting off some of the things that we haven’t yet figured out how to rectify.

When COVID struck in 2020, the then-eighth grader’s Upper Valley, New Hampshire middle school campus shut down for several weeks to pivot to virtual learning, like most others across the country. Paige knew then that her daughter Amy — whose name has been changed in this piece for the student’s privacy — was at risk of falling behind even further. Once online school started, live instruction was only on a “part-time basis,” Paige said.

“There was lost learning time,” she said. “Sometimes there weren’t teachers because the teachers were sick.”

Although Paige didn’t know it yet, Amy had dyslexia. For years, the now-17-year-old’s condition went undiagnosed. Meanwhile, it complicated the teen’s part-time job at a clothing store, because she struggled to type in email addresses at the cash register.

In a last-ditch effort to help her daughter, Paige connected with a tutor specializing in phonics-based literacy, who she now works with via a relatively new state program. After beginning tutoring, Amy showed quick improvement on spelling and reading tests administered by her high school, Paige said. Amy’s literacy coach recognized signs of dyslexia and pointed the family toward screening for the disability, which led to her diagnosis and extra services at school.

“I’ve seen progress,” Paige said. “The way [her tutor] works with her is not a way … a teacher would have the time to work with her in a classroom situation.”

That sort of individualized, intensive coaching is a key solution the Granite State has bet on to help students like Amy get back on track after the pandemic. The state is entering its second year offering the scholarship, which uses a digital wallet to provide $1,000 for private tutoring to any young person whose education was negatively impacted by the pandemic. The scholarship is available to all students, regardless of need, and can be applied toward tutoring from state-approved educators.

“When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’” New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said. “In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”

But families in New Hampshire have tapped into less than a third of the available scholarship funds. So far this academic year, 724 young people have received scholarships — accounting for just $724,000 out of a $2.5 million total funded by federal COVID relief cash. Upon inception, the state granted scholarship eligibility only to students from low-income families, but with signups lagging and substantial funds remaining, they made access universal.

State testing in 2022 revealed that more than half of New Hampshire students were not proficient in math and over 40% were behind in English, though scores have rebounded slightly since 2021, according to data provided by the state. Research shows sustained individual or small-group tutoring can be one of the best ways to help children catch up.

“One student might be struggling with functions. Another is struggling with algebraic equations,” Edelblut said. “Those are the kinds of things that in a one-on-one tutoring session with a teacher that can be drawn out, they can be addressed, they can be targeted, and we can fill in those gaps.”

Soon after the Paige family began tutoring, they saw a post on social media about the YES! grant and realized they qualified. Though they’re still working out the logistics of the digital wallet, the funds will cover more than two months of intensive lessons, which will be “definitely helpful, without a doubt,” Paige said.

The program has also served its purpose for student Sylas Marrotte. The scholarship gave him access to a trained special education teacher for twice-a-week math and reading tutoring, grandmother Sherry Newman said.

“My grandson, who already had learning disabilities, was falling way behind [during COVID],” Newman wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. “The tutor was very flexible and supportive.”

The program could help to “democratize” the private tutoring market, which often is available only to wealthier families, said Matthew Kraft, associate professor of education at Brown University. 

But in his eyes, the slow uptake among low-income families is a damning indicator, signaling either poor advertising to the neediest parents or failure to alleviate other barriers such as transportation costs. 

It’s possible many families “just never learned about the program or couldn’t figure out how to sign up or didn’t think that they could make it work,” Kraft said. “I don’t think … they’ve met the demand in that group of students.”

Nationwide, parental interest in learning recovery options has been lower than policymakers would have hoped, according to recent from the Brookings Institute. Despite significant gaps in learning for millions of students across the country, less than a third of families said they wanted their kids to participate in tutoring and less than a quarter said they were interested in district-run summer camps.

Even if all the New Hampshire tutoring funds get disbursed, Kraft observed, it will still only serve 2,500 learners — a drop in the bucket compared to the state’s over 185,000 students, including roughly 50,000 who are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy indicator for the number of students living in poverty.

The New Hampshire Department of Education does not “at this time” know the share of low-income students who have taken advantage of the tutoring scholarship money compared to wealthier youth, Edelblut said. Students could opt for virtual sessions in cases where transportation presented a barrier, he noted.

The YES! scholarship is one of three state-funded tutoring options available to New Hampshire families. The state announced this month that it had that will give more than 100,000 students access to the site’s 24/7 digital tutoring services. Since early in the pandemic, the state has also partnered with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan’s initiative, providing the state’s students with free access to the site’s learning resources. That site has seen about 4,300 New Hampshire visitors, said Kimberly Houghton, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Education, although she did not have figures on how many tutoring sessions students have actually participated in.

Among the 74 individuals and organizations registered by the state as , including specialists in math, literacy, speech and executive functioning, a handful said over email that none or just one student had reached out for tutoring sessions.

But Krista Martin, who runs the Sylvan Learning centers in Portsmouth and Salem, has worked with six students who have used YES! scholarship money to pay for sessions. Two of those families were already paying for Sylvan tutoring services before the grant and now use the funds to offset costs, but the other four enrolled once they received the scholarship, Martin said. 

For the most part, families come in hopes that the sessions will help their kids recover from the pandemic, Martin wrote in an email.

“​​For many of our students, the breakdowns started during the COVID years,” Martin said. “Since the pandemic, we have heard from many families that they want their children to enjoy school again and show interest in what they are learning like they did before COVID.”

For the Paige family, Amy’s struggles began earlier, but YES! has helped — at least a little — along the way. On an August evening in northern New Hampshire, tutor Lynne Howard sat at her dining table and helped the teen break down words into their individual sound components. Howard was a longtime reading specialist in the local schools and now runs a tutoring company called Summit Literacy.

“Say hush,” Howard said.

“Hush,” Amy responded.

“Now say hush but change ‘shh’ to ‘mm,’ ” Howard added on.

“Hum,” Amy answered.

Word by word, sound by sound, Howard and Amy made out ways to fill the student’s learning gaps. They identified prefixes, suffixes, root words, closed and open vowels — steadily making progress to improve her spelling. And their time together ended with praise that, for many years before tutoring, Paige was concerned she’d never hear about her daughter’s literacy.

“And that’s it, you worked hard today,” Howard said at the end of an hour. “Excellent job.”

“It’s actually a little surreal” seeing the rich slate of offerings, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of the .��

He’s worked at summer learning organizations for over a quarter century, making what used to be a difficult case to school administrators: That districts should offer camp-style July programs to all students rather than enrolling only those who flunked classes during the academic year.

Suddenly, his job has become much easier. 

A growing consensus has elevated summer learning programs to top priority after three consecutive school years disrupted by the pandemic. Several studies, including a 2018 , show camps blending fun and academics give students a leg up in key subject areas. So with millions of students nationwide lagging behind grade level in math and reading, and with schools sitting on billions of dollars in COVID relief cash, summer learning programs have become a go-to solution. 

So far, schools nationwide have poured $3.1 billion in American Rescue Plan dollars into summer and afterschool initiatives, according to an from Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Summer learning has emerged as districts’ “number one priority” for academic recovery spending, said Phyllis Jordan, the organization’s associate director.

“We’re actually investing in programs that we know work and have had results. We just get to do them at a much larger scale because there’s finally funding for it,” U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Cindy Marten told ����Ӱ��. 

“If you put enriching, engaging experiences together for kids and give them a chance to be together, they can learn.”

However, the picture remains murky on just how much progress states, districts and community organizations have actually made toward catching up students before the school year re-starts.

“We do not have data on the number of summer programs this year compared to years past,” said Jen Rinehart, senior vice president of strategy and programs at the Afterschool Alliance. “Similarly, we do not have data on the number of students enrolled this year.”

Marten acknowledged she was not aware of any federal effort to track how many youth are engaging in summer learning programs this year and did not clarify when the results of these programs will come into focus.

To fill the gap, ����Ӱ�� obtained exclusive datasets from , a data service that tracks school policy, and the research-based auditing publicly shared information about districts’ summer offerings. Burbio’s figures include the 200 largest U.S. school systems and CRPE’s cover 100 major metropolitan districts, many of which overlap. Though there are roughly 13,800 districts in the country, the 200 largest account for over a quarter of the nation’s students.

The analysis comes after the Department of Education announced the Engage Every Student Initiative in July to expand access to summer and afterschool offerings. Accompanying the launch, First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured programs in Connecticut, Michigan and Georgia.

The Burbio and CRPE numbers reveal that the vast majority of school systems did indeed provide opportunities for students to catch up on learning and most offered their summer programs at no cost to families. Specifically:

• 93% of districts, according to Burbio, and 87%, according to CRPE, offered summer learning programs this year

• 79% of school systems that had programs provided them at no cost to families

• The average program length was 154 hours, just under four weeks and roughly equivalent to 12% of the academic school year. However, some offerings only covered about 30 hours, while others made up nearly 350 total hours

Additionally, most districts offered programs that went beyond rote academics — including activities such as theater, debate and robotics — and about 2 in 5 worked with community organizations to flesh out their camps. Nearly all programs included breakfast, lunch or both:

• Of the districts that offered summer learning opportunities, at least 83% included credit recovery options, 80% mixed academics with enrichment activities such as sports, arts or social-emotional learning, 48% offered programs for students with learning disabilities and 39% had dedicated options for English learners

• 96% of programs provided meals to children and 74% offered free transportation

• At least 39% of districts partnered with community organizations on summer offerings

The data align with recent figures reported by the , which surveyed a representative sample of 859 public schools in June. The figures are not an apples-to-apples comparison with the Burbio and CRPE data because they focus on individual schools rather than districts, but also point to extensive programming nationwide. NCES found:

• Three-quarters of schools offered learning and enrichment programs this summer

• School leaders estimated that 18-20% of their students enrolled, compared to 13-16% during a typical year

• 49% of education leaders said they partnered with an outside organization, 14% offered internship programs and 13% offered summer jobs or work-based learning programs

“When we talk about academic recovery … you can’t do it just within the regular school day,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “You need to make sure acceleration is extra time. The summer has become that time.”

A question of equity

Maritza Guridy, who has five children in Philadelphia public schools and also works as deputy director of parent voice with the , said some families in her network were able to find programs that met their needs while others were not.

“For those that [registered] early, they were able to get in there. For those that waited, it’s unfortunate,” she told ����Ӱ��.

She enrolled her kids in a local chapter of the nationally acclaimed program and also for a shorter stint at an organization called . Among her considerations were aspects like program cost, learning opportunities and emotional supports, but also factors like fun, clear communication from leadership and a building with central air.

In addition to academics, her children have practiced yoga and went for twice-a-week swim lessons at the local YMCA. One day, they came home with a gleeful announcement: “Mommy, I jumped into the deep side of the pool today — and I wasn’t scared!”

It thrilled Guridy, but she knew other families have missed out on similar joys because of barriers such as lack of transportation or no translated information about the opportunity. Guridy wants officials who plan programs to consider accessibility.

“Is [messaging] being offered in different languages?,” she prompts them. “How are parents supposed to enroll their children if they don’t even understand the application?”

It’s an equity issue, said Clarke, the National Summer Learning Association VP.  Youth who don’t have access to summer programs can see academic gains evaporate between June and September, a well-documented concept known as “summer slide.” Now the issue is particularly pressing, because students living in poverty have the starkest pandemic learning deficits.

“Families with access and privilege go into their bank accounts and provide great opportunities for their kids during the summertime,” he said. “The 26 million young people that are on free and reduced lunch … don’t have that luxury to do so. But they certainly need, want and deserve to have those opportunities.”

‘Explosion’ or ‘afterthought?’

With the stakes at an all-time high as schools reel from the pandemic’s impacts, experts have mixed views on whether summer offerings have actually scaled up this year.

“We’re seeing an explosion of programs,” said Ron Ottinger, executive director of , an organization connected to a network of thousands of providers across the country.

Meanwhile, Christine Pitts, who has done her own summer learning analysis as CRPE’s director of impact and communications, has a more pessimistic view.

In 2022, “[districts] were offering less than they were last year. So it’s almost like summer slipped back into that characterization of being an afterthought again,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her team found that school systems provided fewer offerings for English learners and fewer programs with social-emotional supports this summer compared to last.

“It’s hard to speculate at a national level, why that might have dropped off,” said Marten, the deputy secretary. Some districts may have decided their 2021 summer programs had done enough to catch learners up and that they could scale back this year, she said. However, if leaders wanted to maintain programs but were facing a lack of funds, she encouraged them to tap resources from the new initiative.

Contrasting the data Pitts saw, Nicholas Munyan-Penney spoke to officials in over 30 states about their summer learning programs while researching for a report with . The narrative he heard was of continued growth.

“Anecdotally, they’ve said that there’s definitely been an increase in enrollment this summer,” the researcher told ����Ӱ��.

Rinehart also cites data that indicate an upward trend. In the spring of 2022, her organization and 90% said they were planning to offer summer programs, compared to 79% at the same time a year earlier. Respondents also indicated they expected upticks in enrollment, with an increased share expressing concern they wouldn’t be able to meet families’ demand for programs.

In one of the only direct comparisons between this year and last, the recently released NCES data found no change between 2021 and 2022, with the share of schools saying they offered summer learning programs holding steady at 75%.

‘How are we going to fill the staff?’

One factor often hindering summer learning expansion has been a staff, only the latest symptom of wider shortages that have affected K-12 schools for much of the past year.

“Officials are finding it very hard to find teachers,” said Domenech. “In many cases, the problem has been that where the district has large numbers of kids sign up for the summer programs, they wind up wanting to cut back because they just don’t have the staff to cover it.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, administrators had to from their summer offerings, about 1 in 6 students who had signed up, because of “unanticipated staffing challenges.”

Gia Maxwell works as a site director at summer learning provider . Throughout the spring, she joined monthly calls with leaders from across the Breakthrough network, which operates in 26 cities. Her colleagues were continually worried about finding enough instructors.

“Everyone was talking about, ‘How are we going to fill the staff? How are we going to fill the staff,’” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her Miami program usually finds all 130 youth and 30 adult staff for its summer teaching corps by May, she said. But this year, it took until halfway through teacher training in mid-June to recruit everyone, and they had to hire more teenage candidates than usual. 

The Providence, Rhode Island Breakthrough location was forced to this summer altogether, explaining “we have struggled to recruit students and teachers this year.”

To combat shortages, Arkansas brought in tutors from its to staff summer programs, said Munyan-Penney. In West Virginia, program leaders pulled from teacher training programs in the state to fill out their summer learning staff ranks. And Arizona boosted teachers’ wages 20% for the summer months to entice instructors.

They’re among the states “​​thinking about the staffing issue and being proactive about it,” said the Education Reform Now researcher.

‘Math, Reading and a Little Stampeding’

Several states shared provisional data with ����Ӱ�� on their summer offerings, though many said they won’t have finalized enrollment or academic impact numbers for months.  

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey launched the which state leaders estimate has served about 100,000 campers — 10% of the state’s 1 million students — across 680 sites, including at least one in every county. 

Arizona officials went to great lengths to spread the word about the program. The state ran a including ads on television, radio, social media and in magazines, and direct texts to parents in both English and Spanish informing them of the free programs.

“We targeted lower-income families, as the goal of free summer camp was to see the highest number of campers from families that may not have been able to afford an adventure-style summer camp in prior years,” Kaitlin Harrier, the governor’s senior policy advisor, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. 

The governor’s office opted for a “summer camp” approach rather than a “summer school” model, describing the opportunities as “Math, Reading, and a Little Stampeding,” said Harrier.

“It is no secret that when kids are having fun, it sets up a great foundation for learning,” she added.

In Connecticut, the state also rolled out a grant program to help providers beef up their summer offerings and defray program costs for low-income youth. The state disbursed roughly $8 million in grants last summer and increased that sum to $12 million for 2022, said Eric Scoville, communications director for the State Department of Education.

Enrollment across a sample of 121 locations nearly doubled, from 17,000 to 32,000, between 2020 and 2021, according to an spearheaded by University of Connecticut researchers. However, it’s too early to tell how many students the state reached this summer, said Scoville.

In North Carolina, all 115 school districts offered one or more summer learning programs this year funded by COVID relief money, each attended by 30 to 200 students, said Todd Silberman, a public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. The enrollment figures will not be finalized for several weeks, he said, but he expects the total will be lower than 2021, when the state legislature required math, science, English and enrichment summer learning programs.

At the city level, Baltimore City Public Schools has scaled up its programming sharply thanks to COVID relief dollars. The maximum number of youth the 77,800-student district had served between June and August previous to the pandemic had been 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. But in 2021, they reached 15,000 and have served at least that many again in 2022.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��.

Tulsa, for its part, has also cultivated a thriving summer learning culture, part of a wider “City of Learning” initiative that has been in the works for several years. That infrastructure has made the district into a poster child for community partnership, with over 40 youth-serving organizations contributing to the district’s programming this summer — including clubs for debating, biking and rowing.

“The summer is the time that kids get to experience those things they otherwise would not have the opportunity to do, especially during the school year,” said Jackie DuPont, executive director of the , which orchestrates the connections between the nonprofits and the district.

However, the district has not been able to maintain its high summer learning enrollment. Last summer, about a third of its 33,000 students participated in summer learning — an unusually large share. This year, a total of 7,000 youth engaged in the school system’s initiative, Director of Expanded Learning Jessica Goodman estimated. 

“​​Last summer was really an immediate response to not having kids in our school buildings … so some families just needed that time more than they did this summer,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Despite enrollment fluctuations, Marten believes the proliferation of new summer learning programs nationwide will outlast the influx of federal funding.

“Communities will fall in love with these programs,” she said. “They will say, ‘We’re never going to let this stop. We’re not just doing this because there was a pandemic. We’re doing this because this is what’s good for kids. Let’s keep doing it.’”

The course is “Cloudy With a Chance of Science,” and James Ramirez places his hand-fashioned tin foil boat into a bin of water, squealing with excitement as he discovers it floats. The first grader and his classmates are learning about density by testing how many pebbles each students’ contraption will hold before it sinks.

Ramirez tosses in every stone from his first handful — quickly surpassing the class record of five pebbles — and rushes back for more as his boat remains above water. The child, who is reserved and hasn’t spoken yet this period, keeps adding weight, laughing and wriggling his shoulders with each successful placement.

“…27, 28, 29…” 

He has the attention of the class now and his peers count with him.

“…42, 43, 44…”

With each pebble, Ramirez is doing more than proving he crafted a sturdy ship. He is accomplishing something educators across the country are anxiously hoping he and millions of students like him can do: accelerate their learning to get back on track after COVID.

The first grader is one of 481 youngsters enrolled in Baltimore’s Emerging Scholars program this summer and one of over 15,000 students participating in no-cost summer learning opportunities through Baltimore City Schools. Thanks to COVID relief funds, the 77,800-student district is serving more than twice as many young people as its pre-pandemic max of 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. 

Among the offerings are typical summer school options like credit recovery and career exploration, but also more specialized programs like debate, farm and forest camp, robotics and “Freedom Schools” focused on Black history. The Emerging Scholars program stands out as a camp providing accelerated academic instruction, but with none of the cost or admission requirements typical of gifted programming.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��. “We wanted students to not only make progress academically, focusing on math and [English], but also the social-emotional aspect as well as enrichment.”

Young people in and nationwide continue to score far below pre-pandemic levels in reading and math tests, with more severe deficits for high-poverty schools. Experts estimate it may take a half-decade to fully recover. Meanwhile, many officials pin their hopes on summer learning efforts like those in Baltimore to make up lost ground.

“Especially because of COVID, the kids are a little behind,” said Claudia Wiseman, a second-grade summer science instructor with Baltimore Emerging Scholars. During the school year, she’s an elementary special educator and said months of Zoom school have meant many young learners still lack basic skills like how to hold a pencil. The students she’s teaching now will be “a little better prepared for second grade,” she hopes.

It’s afternoon pickup time at the Emerging Scholars’ John Ruhrah Elementary School campus, and Ramirez’s mother Christy Miranda arrives. Staff tell her about her son’s latest feat: 63 pebbles.

Miranda beams. The program is helping the family recognize their son’s potential, unlocking academic capacities she didn’t realize he possessed.

“He’s learning a lot,” she told ����Ӱ��. “I didn’t know he had the ability to do so.”

During the year, her son has few opportunities for rigorous coursework, she said, explaining that his school is “very defunded.”

But this summer is different. Baltimore Emerging Scholars is a six-week gifted and talented program. In collaboration with , a global leader in gifted education, the camp provides high-level content in science, math and literacy to rising 1st  through 6th graders. 

“During the regular year, [school] is just teachers rambling on about stuff I already know about … but this is new material,” said rising fifth grader Basil Coleman. “I’m just having a great time here.”

Unlike most other gifted programs, the camp doesn’t rely solely on test scores for eligibility but rather welcomes virtually any student who is up for the challenge. As a result, the cohort of students is more diverse than the group of students identified for gifted lessons during the academic year. Some 68% of summer students are Black, 14% are Hispanic, 9% are white and 3% are Asian — figures that closely resemble district-wide demographic averages.

Rae Lymer, who manages the program and reviews every student application, explained that anytime a student has a recorded assessment at or above grade level, it automatically qualifies the youngster for the program. If such a metric does not exist, the administrator calls families directly, looking for an alternative qualification such as if the applicant likes to ask lots of questions or thinks outside the box.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, what I hear is, ‘My kid is completely under-challenged and they’re not motivated by school and so that’s why you’re not seeing scores,’” Lymer told ����Ӱ��, explaining that the program almost never turns away motivated students. 

Youth who choose to participate usually rise to the occasion, the data suggest. While the summer program does not yet have numbers on its academic impact, Emerging Scholars also runs afterschool offerings during the fall and spring. In 2020-21, the most recent data available, the share of participants testing at or above grade level increased 18 percentage points in reading and 39 percentage points in math over the course of the year.

“We’re learning advanced stuff and we’re able to get ahead,” said 11-year-old Ama Amoateng, between stints on the playground during recess. “It makes me feel smarter.”

After engaging in the summer program, “many of these kids will become identified [as gifted],” anticipates Stacey Johnson, spokesperson for Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. “It’s reaching kids we wouldn’t otherwise reach.”

Indeed, parent Torrey Parker said his daughter Skylar got “bumped up” in reading and science last school year, which he believes was “absolutely” because of the work she did in the program.

The rapid growth attests to what education scholars have long posited: That academic talent is equally distributed across all students without regard to race, class or gender — but that access to advanced learning opportunities are not. 

“We firmly believe that if opportunities are provided, students will flourish,” said Lymer.

In one reading course focused on mystery novels, rising fifth graders are already 12 chapters into their third book in as many weeks and engaging in what their instructor called “detective work” to predict the ending. In another classroom, second graders concoct oobleck, a water and cornstarch mixture that has both solid and liquid properties, to learn about states of matter and “non-Newtonian fluids.” Down the hall in “Toyology,” first graders study inertia and momentum by unleashing metal and plastic slinkies down a set of stairs.

A classroom of fifth graders peer down the lenses of microscopes at magazine cutouts of the letter “e,” diagramming what they see at various magnification levels. It’s several students’ first time using a microscope and they’re surprised to find what one describes as “static on a TV.”

“They were playing, but they were also learning,” said Toyology instructor Tamika Robinson.

Even the students admit it’s a good time.

“Because it’s called summer school, most of us thought it would be like school … but instead it’s a lot of activities and really engaging,” said Brooke Bennett, 12.

Propelled, perhaps, by rave reviews, the camp has grown nearly three-fold since its 2019 launch and added about 35% new seats this year while transitioning back to in-person programming for the first time since COVID. Staffing challenges, which have of numerous summer programs across the country, haven’t posed a barrier for Emerging Scholars. In fact, two teachers rather than one work in each classroom under its co-teaching model.

“Many of our teachers come back from year to year because they really respect and value their time with our program,” said Lymer.

As the day winds down, a dozen rising first graders arrive at their last class, Social-Emotional Learning. Shoulders slouch and one student’s head is on his desk. They’ve just watched a on how to keep a growth mindset and their instructor Brother Modlin wakes them up with some call-and-response. 

“It’s not ‘I can’t do it,’ is it class?” He asks the question by trailing off. “It’s ‘I can’t do it…’”

“YET,” they exclaim, picking up their heads and once again regaining attention.

Modlin works as a school counselor during the year, but was previously a therapist at a juvenile detention center in the city. 

“My whole thing as a counselor is about growth mindset,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We’re going to have bad situations, especially in Baltimore. … If I give them a growth mindset, they can rise out of any situation without depending on anyone but themselves.”

The lessons are having an impact for 10-year-old Akorede Adekola.

“I feel really confident and relief [after SEL class],” he said. “I get to show my feelings and get it all out.”

The program’s approach, coupling rigorous academic work with emotional supports, could be a promising model, believes fourth-grade instructor Michelle Brown-Christian. She scoffs at the idea that the curricula, fashioned for gifted children, should be reserved for only a select few.

“This could work for any child that wants to learn,” she said.