Congratulations to our 2010 Excellence in Summer Learning Award winners

Picture is courtesy of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project.

Each year, the National Summer Learning Association brings all hands on deck for a nationwide search for the best summer learning programs.  We solicit applications broadly and wait eagerly to read rich details of programs serving youth in different ways all over the country. Inevitably, we all find a bit of ourselves and our own childhoods in the applications. Programs focusing on the arts find a soft spot with me, and stories of leadership development, college and career preparation and service learning always inspire and remind us why our work is so important.

Every program that applies has something to teach the field, but to award the Excellence in Summer Learning Award, we are looking for a program that is exemplary in both its organizational infrastructure and its model at the point-of-service. The review process is rigorous; programs are first scored on their written applications, using a rubric that encompasses nine domains of program quality and that aligns with our Comprehensive Assessment of Summer Programs. We engage past Excellence Award winners and other experts in the field as application reviewers and always find their diversity of thought and experience to be an invaluable addition to the process.

After applications are scored, 10-12 programs are selected for phone interviews with Association staff and external experts.  This year, for the first time, we also conducted site visits to five finalists. Site visits certainly added additional rigor to the process and made this year one of the toughest competitions yet.

We are so excited to award Horizons Colorado Academy/Horizons National and Sadie Nash Leadership Project with the 2010 Excellence in Summer Learning Award. While both programs are already leaders in the field of summer learning, we hope that this award will elevate and celebrate their work with youth to reach an even wider audience of practitioners, policymakers, families and researchers.

Sadie Nash Leadership Project is a program for high school women based in Brooklyn, New York.  During the six-week summer program, young women look deeply at the role of women and examine how society’s traditional power structure impacts disenfranchised communities. Association staff members Jennifer Brady and Jody Libit visited the program this summer and reported back that the learning taking place in group discussions was “phenomenal” and reminded them of a college seminar on women’s studies.  Sadie Nash is a fantastic example of a program that pushes youth to think, create and achieve beyond the typical boundaries of what’s expected of them in school or in life.  We never know how deeply youth can understand and contribute to complex topics until we set the expectation that they can. I’m so glad that Sadie Nash has set the bar so high for the 100 young women it reaches each summer.

Association staff speak often about our vision for summer learning programs that integrate academic acceleration with a focus on social and developmental growth, and Horizons National and Horizons Colorado Academy truly exemplify that vision. By bringing public school children to private school campuses, Horizons program build confidence in youth in their ability to succeed in new settings. Horizons offers hands-on, project-based learning opportunities that integrate rigorous academic content into engaging, youth-driven experiences.  Instead of losing reading skills in the summer, or even maintaining them, Horizons youth gain an average of four months of grade level equivalency in reading over the summer  —  something that is sure to help them enter school confident and prepared, year after year.  Horizons also teaches all youth how to swim during the program, meeting a very real and specific need of its community of learners. Of course, the end of summer camping trip isn’t too shabby either!

It’s hard to believe that we’ll be releasing the 2011 Excellence Award application in just a few months at our November conference in Indianapolis.  The Excellence Award process is one of the best tools we have to learn about programs all over the country, and there is nothing we love more than spreading the word about innovative, high-quality programming. So to all the programs out there — we want to hear from you! Look for the 2011 application to be posted on our web site in November. Or better yet, get it firsthand in Indianapolis!

Add comment August 10th, 2010

The Association kicks off work with 3 innovative summer transition pilot sites

Last month, the Association awarded planning grants to three innovative school district and community partnerships to support a six-month planning process to enhance their summer programming for students transitioning from middle school to high school. The partnerships selected for this planning opportunity are the Philadelphia Youth Network (PYN) and the School District of Philadelphia (PA); Open Meadow Step Up and the Portland Schools Foundation’s Ninth Grade Counts Initiative (OR); and BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) and the Springfield Public Schools (MA).

The Association’s summer transition team is excited to kick off our work with the “pilot sites” with visits to their current programs this summer.  We will use what we learn about the unique needs of each site to help guide the focus of a professional learning community, which will include planning meetings and field experiences that aim to expose pilot sites to expert knowledge and exemplary program models, in order to help them build knowledge in a collaborative manner to inform their enhanced program plans.    We’re also looking forward to presenting with the pilot sites on this initiative at the Association’s national conference in Indianapolis this November.

The grants were made available through the Association’s ongoing field-building work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to use the summer time strategically to support the needs of youth entering high school to help keep them on track to graduate.  The grantees were selected based on feedback from advisors and experts from the field on the key needs for supporting the bridge to high school during an event hosted by the Association this past march in Tampa, Florida.

If you would like to learn more about this work and contribute ideas about inventive ways to use educational technology and digital media to boost college readiness, please visit the Next Generation Learning Challenges website or visit the initiative’s page on Facebook or Twitter.

Add comment August 5th, 2010