Let’s face it, after slogging through a yearlong global health crisis while juggling the dizzying demands of a school year that looked anything but normal, the last thing you want to think about is making up lost ground this summer.

“Often we have a good group of teachers who want to work over the summer but I do feel teachers are exhausted,” said Ginny Kelbish, a school psychologist in the Antietam School District. “I have said through COVID, ‘I might not even be doing as much work, but the work I’m doing takes three more steps.’ They’re doing so much more phone calling, so much more parent interaction, so much more reaching out to students. And even some of what they’ve had to see children experience, I think there’s even vicarious stress.”

The Pennsylvania Department of Education recently announced it’s launching a two-year study funded by a $1 million federal grant to take full measure of just how extensive the impact of this pandemic has been on teaching and learning. But the reality is that everyone has been impacted negatively by this pandemic – particularly lower income students and students of color. The scope of it can seem overwhelming.

Fortunately, there are solutions in the works, and plenty of money to fund them. Pennsylvania will receive nearly $5 billion in federal relief under the American Rescue Plan for K-12 education to support addressing students’ social, emotional, and academic needs beginning this summer through the 2023-24 school year. Of that, more than $1 billion is directed to address the impact of the pandemic, which may include programs such as summer learning or summer enrichment, extended day, comprehensive after-school programs, or extended school year programs beginning this summer.

A summer like no other

As of press time, individual school districts were still hashing out plans for summer programming. But whether this summer is spent directly addressing learning loss or mapping out new strategies to hit the ground running in the fall, the exhaustion educators and students are feeling needs to be considered.

“Obviously we know catching up academically coming out of COVID is super critical and important,” said Aaron Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, which has been coordinating multipartner summer learning programs across the country for over 25 years.

“But we try to make a distinction between summer school and summer learning. We want to help people. But we want the summer to feel a little bit different.”

At the beginning of March, NSLA held an inaugural summer learning bootcamp where partners in school districts, nonprofits, government agencies, and the corporate sector gathered to address summer learning in general, and the unique challenges of this summer in particular.

“A lot of kids have been cooped up. Sports have been canceled. There’s no gym. There’s no PE. There were a lot of challenges,” Dworkin said. “And we know kids learn better academically when they get physical activity and participate in enrichment. So there’s been this kind of push where we’re trying to make everyone take a holistic view.”

As one of the largest coordinators of summer learning programs in the country, Dworkin has seen them all. One program that consistently stands out, though, is right here in Pennsylvania.

Teachers in the Parks

If you could visualize an ideal summer program tailor-made for the COVID-19 pandemic, it would probably look exactly like Teachers in the Parks. Safe social distancing in the outdoors without a screen in sight while enjoying the benefits of a low-stress inperson learning environment? What could be better?

Of course, TIPS wasn’t created for the pandemic; it was created over a decade and a half ago by Matthew Hathaway, a fourth grade teacher in the Exeter Township School District. Hathaway had studied the detrimental effects of the “summer slide’’ as part of his master’s degree program at Millersville University and wanted to devise a low-stress way to supplement his students’ learning in a fun outdoor environment.

Since its inception, the program has only grown in popularity and spread to neighboring school districts. While TIPS went virtual last year, with vaccinations ramping up and a return to normalcy on the horizon, Hathaway says they’ll be back to offering full-day in-person classes this summer as part of existing summer programs. But he’s taking a measured approach.

“What we can’t do is overreact to the losses from COVID and from summer and create a system that seems punitive to children,” Hathaway said.

That’s why his goal is to keep it feeling more like play than school. TIPS has partnered with the district and the township to have teachers pop into regularly scheduled recreation activities at the community parks for a couple of hours of math and literacy instruction.

“We are also going to be bringing in the gifts of our local  community,” he said. “For example, karate classes, local  nutrition places, yoga classes, dance classes – anything our community has a gift for, we’re bringing them into the park. They’re also going to be receiving breakfast and lunch. And then in the afternoon, the district is going to be busing them back to the schools for more intense reading instruction just for the afternoon. So it’s about finding balance."

The perfect setting

Melissa Woodard, assistant superintendent at the Wyomissing Area School District and a member of the TIPS board, has been running a TIPS program in the district for three years after bringing it over from the Boyertown Area School District where she’d previously worked. It took a bit of convincing at first, but when teachers in Wyomissing saw how the students opened up in a less structured outdoor setting, they opted to fully embrace the TIPS approach.

It doesn’t hurt that the program operates in a picturesque setting at a local park with a lake, walking trails, and an old stone house to store supplies and provide an indoor option in case of bad weather. That’s why Woodard is desperately hoping to keep it in person this summer – to entice more participation from teachers as well as students.

“It’s a setting that potentially offers some respite from the daily grind that the teachers have faced day in and day out throughout this year,” she said. “I mean, we’ve been so dependent on technology. And while that’s positive, can we get down to real learning from books and talking and discussing, without waiting for somebody to buzz or beep in? And just getting to be physically around people – I think that is motivation in and of itself.”

It takes a village

Like Hathaway, Woodard is connecting with the district’s summer school lunch program to keep students fed. She’s also brainstorming ideas to team up with community institutions – such as the museum and planetarium at the other end of the park – to bring in science and social studies themes as well.

The ultimate goal for a program like TIPS, she said, is to meet not only students’ academic needs over the summer but also their basic and socialemotional needs. It’s about taking a holistic approach that integrates the community’s strengths. And with the whole community eager to move beyond the damage this pandemic has wrought, this is an ideal time to work together on solutions.

“The community always has had the burden of responsibility to care for our children when  schools close over the summer,” Hathaway said. “And there are so many gifts the community has developed, but they’re not necessarily academic. And I think that’s really the message that I’ve been trying to send for anyone building new programs. Don’t compete with your community. Find the natural gifts that they all share and figure out how to combine them.”