Each summer, students can expect to find the Kenton County Public Library set up at Erlanger parks, eager to check their books out to day camp attendees.
The library system partners with most of the county’s school districts to create reading programs that help keep students reading while they’re out of school during the summer.
Maintaining academic skills such as math or reading requires students to continue to practice them when away from the classroom. A 2020 study from Brown University found that 34% of students in first grade through seventh grade lose 17% to 34% of the prior year’s learning over summer break.
This loss, referred to as summer learning loss or “the summer slide,” is preventable, said Lise Tewes, school services coordinator for the Kenton County Public Library system. “What will cure summer learning loss is to read,” she said. “And it’s free at the library.”
Heather Bushelman, a Boone County School District multitiered systems of support coach for the adults in the building, compared the summer slide to adults coming back from vacation. When an adult comes back to work from a vacation, she said, they too can find work overwhelming and hard to keep up with because they are out of practice.
“Eating habits and sleeping habits are different,” she said. “It does take adults and kids time to get acclimated (from breaks).”
Bushelman added that students need about four to five weeks to readjust to a school day and the schools’ expectations and standards.
Students lose about a month’s worth of learning on average over the summer, according to a study from the American Education Research Association about the effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores. Further evidence shows students in third grade to fifth grade lose about 20% of their school year gains in reading and 27% of their gains in math, according to data from Scholastic.
According to Kappan research, in the summer between fifth grade and sixth grade, when most districts teach multiplication and division, 84% of students experience a summer slide in math.
“This is something educators have known about for decades,” Tewes said, adding that summer reading programs at libraries aimed to combat the summer slide have been around for more than a century.
Tony Miglio, founder of NKY Tutoring, a service that helps students prepare for ACT and SAT math tests, agreed with Lowe that learning is a skill that needs to be practiced. “Just like with any skill set, if you don’t practice it, it’s going to drop,” Miglio said.
“The more you practice and the more recently that you practice the body will recognize it. It’s muscle memory. If you don’t do it for months at a time, you’ll tend to forget those things.”
Caroline Dearie, founder of Dearie Difference, a tutoring services for those with learning difficulties, suggested parents could help lessen academic loss by having conversations beyond asking “How was your day?” when they see children after school.
“Have a conversation about the book they are reading, rather than checking if they answered the question right,” Dearie said. “We want to give students a chance to understand the material and then expand on it – make it their own. Parents weren’t taught how to facilitate this. But a child needs to experience the material multiple times to fully grasp it.”
Students living in low-income homes tend to lose more of their education over the summer breaks compared to those living in higher-income homes, Tewes said.
“There is a slight slide (in high-income homes), but it’s not nearly as pronounced and it’s overcome as soon as school gets back in session,” she said. “Yes, the kids in well-off and high-income neighborhoods are not reading as much in the summer, but they have so many enriching things happening constantly around them.”
High-income families spend nearly $8,000 more per year on education and enrichment than low-income families, according to a study by the Russell Sage Foundation. That’s a spending gap of more than $100,000 from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Tewes said the summer slide for lower-income families grows each year. Bushelman said that, if students don’t reach the third-grade reading level by the end of third grade, on average, the student won’t get better at reading.
“So that’s where you see such a big gap, and it gets bigger every summer,” Tewes said. “And so, by the time a low-income child is in the fourth grade, they may be two full school years behind their (classmates) who live in high-income neighborhoods.”
Bushelman said Boone County Schools wants equity for its students across the board, though that is hard to monitor during the summer.
The Kenton County Library is not unique in offering summer programs for school-aged children. Tewes said nearly every public library has free programs to help students keep their reading skills up during summer vacation.
Tewes shared another story from another Kenton County librarian over email including a grandmother and her granddaughter using the summer reading program.
The grandmother was bringing her preschool-aged granddaughter to one of the local library branches for summer preschool storytime programs. The granddaughter had suffered emotional trauma, Tewes said, and didn’t speak much except to her grandmother.
The grandmother told Tewes she thought that being around other children and doing fun things would help motivate the little girl to engage verbally. At the start of summer, the grandmother read with the girl to earn the summer reading prizes.
The grandmother and her granddaughter quickly read and logged the required 10 books to win a free book and special T-shirt, Tewes said. The girl was so happy she earned prizes that she wanted to continue to read to earn the raffle tickets that were given as a prize for every additional 10 books read.
The grandma and her granddaughter were daily figures in the Kenton County library that summer – reading books, checking them out, earning raffle tickets, and attending every preschool program offered. By the end of the summer, the granddaughter was talking to other children excitedly in storytime, Tewes said, and she had read 500 books.
“There are years and years of countrywide statistics to prove that kids who are involved in their school summer learning activities do better when they come back to school,” Tewes said. “I would feel that any child who spent an entire summer without doing any reading practice is not going to be performing at the same level in the spring when they return to school, as they had when they left school in the fall.
“It’s just not going to happen because that’s not the way human brains work,” she said. “You have to keep practicing your skills.”