Gerry Broome/AP Photo
Aja Purnell-Mitchell, second from left, sits with her three children, Cartier, 14, left; Kyra, 15, and Kyla, 13, at a local food hub in Durham, N.C., on Friday, May 28, 2021, where they often help their mother. “Getting them back into it, helping them socialize back with their friends, maybe meet some new people, and, of course, pick up the things that they lacked on Zoom,” Purnell-Mitchell said, ticking off her hopes for the summer school session ahead, which will be the first time her children have been in the classroom since the coronavirus outbreak took hold in the spring of 2020.
With her three teenagers vaccinated against COVID-19, Aja Purnell-Mitchell left it up to them to decide whether to go back to school during summer break.
The decision was unanimous: summer school.
“Getting them back into it, helping them socialize back with their friends, maybe meet some new people, and, of course, pick up the things that they lacked on Zoom,” the Durham County, North Carolina, mother said, ticking off her hopes for the session ahead, which will be the first time her children have been in the classroom since the outbreak took hold in the spring of 2020.
Across the U.S., more children than ever before could be in classrooms for summer school this year to make up for lost learning during the outbreak, which caused monumental disruptions in education. School districts nationwide are expanding their summer programs and offering bonuses to get teachers to take part.
Under the most recent federal pandemic relief package, the Biden administration is requiring states to devote some of the billions of dollars to summer programs.
The U.S. Education Department said it is too early to know how many students will sign up. But the number is all but certain to exceed the estimated 3.3 million who went to mandatory or optional summer school in 2019, before the pandemic.
In Montgomery, Alabama, for example, more than 12,000 of the school system’s 28,000 students signed up before the June 1 deadline. Typically about 2,500 go to summer school. Philadelphia had enrolled 14,700 by Friday and was expecting more for the mostly in-person programs, up from the 9,300 students in last summer’s all-virtual sessions.
“It’s an understatement to say the needs are greater this year,” said Kalman Hettleman, an education policy analyst in Maryland.
Some North Carolina teachers will get a $1,200 bonus. There are also bonuses for teachers in certain grades whose students show improvement in reading and math.
Elsewhere, a district in Anderson, South Carolina, has nearly doubled teachers’ summer school pay to $60 an hour. Teachers and nurses in Spring Branch, Texas, are getting raises of up to 20%. In Mississippi, the Starkville Oktibbeha school system raised teachers’ hourly pay by $10, to $35, for the summer.
Connecticut is promising $4,500 stipends to 500 college students who work at K-12 summer programs.
New York City, the nation’s largest school district, with over 1 million youngsters, is offering summer school to all students, not just those falling behind.
“Our kids have been through so much,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in announcing the plans, “and they need our support as we build a recovery for all of us.”
Philadelphia and San Diego are among others to announce districtwide eligibility. Chicago plans to vastly expand its programs.
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Purnell-Mitchell said her children had different reasons for wanting to go to school this summer. Her older daughter, Kyra Mitchell, who has autism, missed the one-on-one interaction with teachers that helps her learn, while Kyla Mitchell did well remotely but wasn’t able to make new friends and socialize. Her son, Cartier Mitchell, said he had had enough time off and was ready to go back.
“I think it’s going to give them some of the milestone markers that they might have missed and give them a better outlook for going into the doors” in the fall, Purnell-MItchell said, “instead of feeling like they’ve lost a year and a half of knowing what they’re doing.”
Thompson reported from Buffalo, N.Y.
