Leveraging Summer: a Down Payment on Long-term Change
Karen Pittman, Senior Fellow and Founder, The Forum for Youth Investment
Almost a full year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we once again find ourselves at a critical juncture. As we head into the spring, schedules are still uncertain. But there is growing confidence schools will reopen in the fall.
With this is anticipation of reopening, there is broad commitment to build back better. There is increased recognition of the role that community partners and families can play and that the impact of the last year on teens and young adults will have lasting ramifications. COVID and the racial reckonings have exposed inefficiencies and inequities. This means we are now face to face with a tangible opportunity to challenge and support school districts and community partners in creating equitable learning and development ecosystems that unleash the potential of all learners, recognize the power of all committed adults, and optimize all learning settings and approaches.
If we are truly intent on not going back to normal, we must recognize the interdependence of systems and center on young people and their families. To do so, school and community leaders must work collaboratively to reflect and take stock to:
- identify innovations and understand roadblocks,
- look at the ways school, family, and community leaders worked or did not work together, and
- hear the lessons learned from students, families, and front-line staff.
I know that teachers, school leaders, community organizations, parents, and young people themselves are rightfully exhausted. It would be easy to say we just need to push through the spring and take a break. However, as I look toward the fall and school buildings reopening, I am convinced that we cannot let another summer go by.
Now is the time to find creative ways to take action together and to use summer as a pivot point for longer-term, sustainable change.
Last spring, in the very first blog post in this Changing the Odds discussion series I reflected on a spring where out-of-school time was all the time and my attention was pulled to summer. Then along with our Readiness Projects PartnersI feared the limitations of summer even as the need was greater than ever before. And I saw potential and opportunity — to acknowledge all learners and all learning environments, to think beyond just academic supports, and to think about the potential of summer as a place to imagine what true partnership, increased diversity, and broader definitions of learning and development could look like.
By May, along with the other Readiness Projects coordinating partners I wrote about the recognition that summer was on track to much more closely match my fear much than the opportunity. While we saw pockets of exceptional supports for young people and innovation (like Pittsburgh Public Schools efforts to use summer to prepare for a return to school in the fall or the math summer camps held by the Metro Richmond Boys & Girls Clubs), for the most part young people went without: without opportunities to connect in meaningful relationships, without opportunities for engaging learning experiences, without summer jobs to earn money critical to their future goals.
Summer 2021 shouldn’t look like 2020. The young people across the nation deserve more. It also shouldn’t look like summers of years past. Summer has traditionally been a time when schools stepped back, families stepped in and community organizations stepped up. This division of labor made sense because the stakes are not only lower in summer (no requirements, no grades, no tests) and the success metrics are different (keep academic skills sharp while having fun, mastering new skills, taking on family responsibilities, having different experiences). If we are intent to Build Forward Together our roles in and focus on summer will have to shift.
This summer can begin to preview “the new normal” and to make a down payment toward the equitable learning ecosystems we hope to create. Where instead of some stepping back and others stepping in, we see communities working collaboratively. We are confident there are many communities that see value in finding some way to use Summer 2021 to document, design, test, or even scale up some ways to BUILD FORWARD TOGETHER to make a down payment on the idea that:
by the summer of 2022, every student should have equitable opportunities for learning and development because every young person and their family has the support needed to create learning pathways across the ecosystem that are attractive, accessible, affordable, appropriate, affirming, and assessable.
The Readiness Projects are challenging local school, government and community leaders to:
- Use summer as a low-stakes testing ground to document, test, and scale different ways to leverage school, family, and community assets in support of accelerated learning and development that can help us build forward together post-COVID.
- Prioritize children and youth most challenged by the pandemic who are also the least likely to have resources for summer programs.
- Place focused attention on teens, especially those whose success trajectories are threatened.
- Ask how you will know how many young people had great summers and why, so you can bring that data into the school year and have a baseline for improvement in 2022.
Over the course of this spring, we’ll be sharing tools and resources, engaging in conversations through our Changing the Odds Thought Leader Interviews and our Making the Invisible Visible Discussion Series, and lifting up examples from across the county. Whether you decide to go big or start small — work with one neighborhood, one group of trusted partners, or one targeted group of learners or families — we invite you to join us in this challenge and in our community dialogue.
Share your examples in our Bright Spots Database. Tag us in your social media posts about your response to summer on Twitter (@forumfyi). Highlight your success with a blog here in our Changing the Odds For Youth dialogue — contact katherine@forumfyi.org to submit a blog.
