Students from low income families struggle to stay away from Summer Slide.

Many students favorite time of the year is summer. They look forward to the late nights, being able to sleep in, hang out with their friends, and not having any homework. Although summer can be very fun for children it can also be dangerous for them as well, especially those students who live in more poverty areas. Jennifer Wolford says that children in low-income households hear 30 thousand fewer words than those who live in a more privileged household. Those losses of words really hurts those children when it comes to learning.

Many students, especially those from low-income families, don’t do educational things during the summer to help them stay on track, so they often forget what they learned and it sets them back. By the time the new school year comes around the students are so far behind that their teacher has to spend time reteaching them what they already learned. This puts a teacher at a disadvantage because many teachers weren’t taught how to reteach material outside of their grade, and it also hurts the student because since they had to spend time relearning things, there isn’t enough time to teach them all of the new material they need to learn in that current grade.

In Athens Clarke County 36.7 percent of the population lives below the poverty rate, and unfortunately, the children in that county suffer from it. Children who live in low-income families face many out of school struggles that really affect their learning ability. They might not get enough sleep because they have to share a bed with 3 other people, a lack of parental guidance because their parents are working more than one job to pay the next rent check, or because they are moving around from place to place and never in a stable environment. Many circumstances can affect children not performing well in the classroom, but for Athens-Clarke County poverty is one of those the main reasons.

Because students struggle with these external issues, the summer can really hurt them. Many students tend to fall down the summer slide. This slide isn’t a fun one, it actually slides them backward. “Summer slide” is the tendency for students, especially those from low-income families, to lose some of the achievement gains they made during the previous school year.

Leslie Hale, executive director of the Books for Keeps program, and her team are on a mission to help prevent students in Athens-Clarke county from going down this slide. Books for Keeps is a program that is a research-based effort to end “summer slide,” the learning loss suffered by many children when they are away from school. Children from low-income families are disproportionately affected by this loss, often due to a simple lack of access to books.

“Our goal is to help them not only retain the skills that they learned during the school year but if we can then advance their skills during the summer, and we are accomplishing that,” said Hale. “We are actually helping advance kids reading skills over the summer, so that’s really exciting for us.”

Claire Suggs is a senior education policy analyst at GBPI, where her research focuses on education finance and school reform issues related to early childhood education, K-12 education and higher education in Georgia. Suggs believes that this issue starts with the parents.

“The more a child is spoken to the more exposure to languages and ideas that they have, and unfortunately low-income kids just don’t have those same opportunities,” said Suggs. “Research has shown that low-income kids are spoken to less and are spoken to and in different ways by their parents or caregivers. You model what you experience, so I think very often those parents just haven’t seen it so they aren’t doing it with their own kids. So in terms of literacy, we see middle and upper-income kids move ahead over the summer and lower income kids falling behind.”

Hale agrees and is taking action to come up with ways to help low-income families learn how to better interact with one another.

“Family engagement, parent engagement is one of the hardest things to do especially talking about those families who are in need,” said Hale. “So I submitted a grant proposal along with our colleagues at United Way of Northeast Georgia that has partnership support from several other entities. We want to bring some funding to Athens to create a pilot and possibly model some approaches that allow us to better serve and provide tools and support to children from low-income families and to their parents as well.”

Helping these children close the achievement gaps is many people’s goal. Teachers, Principals, mentors, Leslie and Claire, but more importantly the parents of these children. Even though these families face a daily struggle, the parents still want to see their children succeed. Leslie Hale hopes to get her grant proposal approved so they can come up with ways to help these parents have better engagement with their children so they don’t fall down that summer slide.

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