Frederica Freyberg:

On the education front, parents and teachers know what the pandemic and remote learning meant for students during the 2020 school year. Loss of learning and social supports. Last year in Green Bay schools, students saw robust summer school options to make up for lost time in the classroom. But what about summer school options this year? Lisa Johnson is the associate director of the district’s summer school program. We talked with her late this week. Lisa, thanks very much for joining us.

Lisa Johnson:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So take us back to summer school in 2021 in your district. Describe what the offerings were, which you deployed almost in a wrap-around way.

Lisa Johnson:

Yeah, we did. We really looked at the whole picture. We talked to our families and our students. What did they — what met their needs? What we really looked at and said families were struggling with things like childcare services at that point in time. A lot of places in our community had closed or weren’t back up to where they had been pre-pandemic. So we really said okay, how do we meet those needs and our kids’ needs? So we moved from half day programming to full day programming, and we really created a robust program around both academics, because we knew coming back from virtual learning and the pandemic that our kids needed that component piece, and we also knew we needed to have some fun too. It was still summer. And so we needed to do those enrichment things and we should try to find that right balance by bringing in community partners and bringing in lots of different people as a community, so thinking about it from a whole community standpoint.

Frederica Freyberg:

So according to a new report, Green Bay really rose to the top across the state for your summer school programming. Could you in your mind or should your district be a model for others?

Lisa Johnson:

That’s a great question. When we go back and reflect on it, I do think there were some great things that we did learn over that time frame. We made a very concerted effort on using summer to help us from that recovery of the pandemic after being virtual, and I do think there’s a lot of things, and there’s a lot of things we’re hoping to continue in the future that we did as well, and hopefully other districts can learn from that model that we put in place.

Frederica Freyberg:

So how was the district able to fund all of that programming last summer, and ramp up staffing to do that?

Lisa Johnson:

So the only way we were able to do it is with the COVID relief dollars which unfortunately are one-time dollars. That is one of the things we are really having to look at is, can we sustain this without that funding source. State reimbursement for summer school doesn’t cover everything that we were able to put in place for last summer. And so that is something that we know is a gap in the future, and what does that look like to be able to sustain this long term.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what were the outcomes once students returned in the fall? Could you see that after the summer?

Lisa Johnson:

You know, it’s a great thing. We know summer school is not a silver bullet but yes, we could certainly see the kids that attended summer school, they came back ready to learn. We didn’t see that typical summer slide. For an elementary student, if they come to summer school, you can see over the course of time, they make up their learning and we didn’t see that slide that normally happens in the summer. We also saw that they were ready from that social/emotional standpoint and regulated to be in class again. And just would come back ready to learn. So between the work we did to prevent and that social/emotional component piece of it, we definitely saw great things, and not that loss of learning time coming back to school just to reground ourselves.

Frederica Freyberg:

So do you feel as though students in the Green Bay district who took part in these summer school programs made up any deficits that resulted from kind of remote learning during the peak of the pandemic?

Lisa Johnson:

Yeah, we did make up some remote deficits within that time frame for our kids. Whether that was at elementary level in terms of their reading component pieces or at secondary, which was some credits and some credit courses for kids that may not have been able to finish it through that virtual model, which wasn’t necessarily their best learning component piece to learn virtually.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what was the response from families to have these options, even including transportation to and from summer school?

Lisa Johnson:

So our families definitely responded. We had over 7,000 students of our 19,000 students attend summer school last year. So we saw a great outpouring of response from our families in sending their kids to summer.

Frederica Freyberg:

So this summer, will the programming be reduced because of the funding?

Lisa Johnson:

Yeah, unfortunately our programming will be reduced. We are going to keep full day. We had to be creative with that. We are doing some full-day models that will be summer school-run, both morning/afternoon with district teachers and we’re prioritizing our Title 1 schools and our achievement gap reduction schools for that programming. And then other schools what we did is we had to be creative and we said we’re going to provide summer school in the morning and then we partnered with our local YMCA who went out and got a large grant that is helping to subsidize the cost for families for that afternoon. So it still provides our families that full-day option that they need to have a place for their kids to be all day, but also keeps our families being able to engage in that summer school component piece in the morning.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, bravo to Green Bay. Thanks very much. Thanks for joining us.

Lisa Johnson:

Thank you for having me.