The Challenge: Summer Learning Loss and the Achievement Gap
It is widely understood that children who are performing below grade level need extra learning opportunities to gain skills and achieve proficiency in core reading, writing, and math to succeed in school and in life. While the importance of afterschool programs has gained considerable attention over the past decade, more and more educational experts consider the summer an even greater opportunity to help children excel academically and socially. Maurice J. Tobin Elementary School, located in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, provides one example of how summer learning programs play an important role in helping children excel.

Studies demonstrate that while all children learn at the same rate during the school year (Alexander and Entwisle 1996), children from low-income families lose the equivalent of three months' literacy skills and two months' math skills during the summer due to a lack of educational opportunities available to them. At the same time, children from more affluent families actually gain one and a half months from the opportunities that are not only available but also encouraged (Fairchild and Boulay 2002). These summer losses, compounded each year, are a major reason why the achievement gap between low- and high-income children grows throughout the elementary school years.

Providing high-quality summer learning opportunities is an important strategy for helping children who are performing below grade-level achieve proficiency in core academic skills. Without fundamental academic skills, children lose interest in school and develop patterns of behavior that lead to serious negative consequences. Research indicates that failure as early as third grade can predict with 68 percent accuracy those students who will later drop out of school (Finn 1989). Moreover, many children from low-income families are left unsupervised during the summer as parents work to provide for the basic needs of their household. Without supervision or positive role models to guide their actions, young children are especially vulnerable to establishing patterns of destructive behavior that may lead to more serious consequences later in life such as delinquency, crime, gang involvement, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy. A recent surge in violence in Boston's low-income communities underscores the importance of providing children with a safe and supportive learning environment during the summer.

About Tobin Elementary
Located in Roxbury, historically described as one of Boston's "toughest" neighborhoods, Tobin Elementary educates approximately four hundred children in grades K–8. The student population consists of 69 percent Hispanic, 28 percent African-American, 1.5 percent Asian, 0.8 percent Caucasian, and 0.7 percent American Indian, with the majority of students coming from low-income families. More than 11 percent of students participate in special education programs, while nearly 19 percent participate in bilingual education programs. With so many educational needs represented within the student body, Principal Cheryl Watson-Harris, her teachers, and her administrative staff are faced with the great challenge of ensuring the educational success of their students.

The Solution: Research-based Summer Tutoring and Mentoring Program
Tobin Elementary partnered with the nonprofit organization BELL—Building Educated Leaders for Life—to implement an educational summer program that includes small-group academic instruction, mentorship, social enrichment, and parental engagement. The program is largely based on the best practices described by Barbara Wasik in her groundbreaking research of effective out-of-school-time tutoring programs (1998), which recommends daily consistency, program structure, high-quality training, close supervision, ongoing assessment, and collaboration with classroom instruction.

At Tobin Elementary, students participate in academic enrichment Monday through Thursday mornings, in classes of fifteen children taught by a certified teacher and supported by a college-age mentor. With a ratio of at least one staff member to every eight students, the faculty develops strong bonds with individual students and provides one-on-one instruction as needed. Afternoon enrichment activities and "Mentor Friday" experiences provide children with a balanced, diverse offering of stimulating, creative, and fun activities to help them develop academically and socially.

The BELL summer program implemented at Tobin Elementary has eight major components:

• Small-group model: All activities are delivered with a staff to student ratio of one to eight, which is much smaller than the usual one to twenty ratios experienced by many urban children during the school year.
• Mentorship: With a focus on mentoring, children connect with positive young adult role models who come from the same community, helping them develop high self-esteem and personal aspirations, and steering them away from destructive activities such as drug abuse and crime.
• Rigorous evaluation: The program includes pre- and post-Stanford Diagnostic tests that measure academic gains and the program's progress. Weekly quizzes refine academic goals and prescribe lesson plans for individual students, and progress reports are discussed with parents after three weeks and also at the end of the program. To learn about improvements in social skills and self-esteem and to gauge program satisfaction among parents, parents and teachers complete program surveys
• Literacy: The students engage in two hours of instruction in reading and writing, using a high-quality, skills-based curriculum that is aligned with national and state language arts standards and assessments. In addition, they read multicultural books with pro-social themes such as tolerance and conflict resolution. Instruction includes interactive exercises involving role-playing, story mapping, brainstorming, art, writing, and discussions
• Math: After literacy, students participate in one hour of math instruction, using activities from a skills-based curriculum. Staff members also integrate verbal, visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic learning style activities into the lessons
• Afternoon enrichment activities: The morning academic component is coupled with an afternoon of structured enrichment activities, including art, dance, music, drama, and sports. All activities involve educational components. For example, physical education includes lessons about body conditioning, personal hygiene, and general health. The afternoon culminates in final projects or performances that support themes and lessons from the morning academic instruction
• Fun Fridays: On Fridays, students participate in events and activities that expose them to the broader community. The day begins with inspirational presentations by guest speakers such as entrepreneurs, professors, doctors, journalists, politicians, and re-enactors of Black history, who share life stories and introduce various careers.
• Parental involvement: There is a series of opportunities for parents to get involved throughout the summer, including workshops, seminars, and celebrations. These activities support a major goal of engaging parents as facilitators and advocates of their children's education. Parents also volunteer as chaperones on field trips, coordinate special events, and work as lunch monitors, and they are encouraged to read to their children every night.

Results
By utilizing a curriculum that reinforces the skills taught in each classroom and aligns with the school's instructional goals, the summer program has had a tremendous impact on the academic achievements of students attending Tobin Elementary:

• Students at Tobin Elementary who have participated in BELL's summer or afterschool programs have gained, on average, at least five months' grade-equivalent skills in literacy and math.
• One hundred percent of students who entered the program at the "failing" level advanced to a higher performance category, according to standardized tests.
• Eighty-one percent of students in the program achieved "proficient" or "advanced" levels in core academic skills, compared to 30 percent of their peers.

Throughout her tenure as principal at Tobin Elementary, Watson-Harris has made a concerted effort to improve communication between school-day staff and twenty-five afterschool and summer partners such as BELL, the Boston University BUILD program, and La Sociedad Latina. Watson-Harris has established bimonthly meetings to foster open dialogue between school staff and partnerships so that they work together effectively to improve student performance. Through strengthened communication, the partner organizations have come to be regarded as part of the school community, and can more seamlessly integrate instructional support and mentoring with regular school-day instruction.

"The regular meetings have directly benefited students because our partners are more aware of our school improvement plan, and can closely align with our goals," said Watson-Harris. "Regular communication has also helped our partners provide more strategic services to Tobin Elementary because they can openly discuss where there are gaps and overlaps, and can come up with plans to address them together."

Tobin Elementary also provides professional development opportunities to its teachers, and to its partnership teachers and tutors, to continue to unify the language, objectives, and focus of both groups of instructors. Using frequent and straightforward written reports from school-day teachers, the partner organizations' staffs are able to ensure the successes demonstrated by students during afterschool hours and summer months are also reflected in the school-day classrooms, so Tobin Elementary students keep building on their academic achievements.

The achievement made by children in the BELL summer program is one example of the approach Watson-Harris uses when working with external partners. "We had faith that the summer program had the potential to make great gains in a short amount of time, but this was extraordinary," said Watson-Harris. "Our creative and consistent intervention approach with our partners really paid off for our students, who are now more confident and committed to their studies."

References
Alexander, K.L. and D.R. Entwisle. 1996. Schools and children at risk. In A. Booth and J.F. Dunn, eds. Family-school links: How do they affect educational outcomes?, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 67–89.

Fairchild, R. and M. Boulay. 2002. What if summer learning loss were an educational policy priority. Presentation for the 24th Annual APPAM Research Conference.

Finn, J.D. 1989. Withdrawing from school. Review of Educational Research, 59(2).

Wasik, B.A. 1998. Using volunteers as reading tutors: Guidelines for successful practices. The Reading Teacher, 51(7), 562–570.