Program Aims to Reduce Summer Learning Loss

It’s a Thursday in July at the Chastain Park pool in Buckhead. And though it may seem like summer camp, this is actually a school. Horizons is a six-week summer learning program. Today, swim coordinator Whitney Warren is coaching seven-year-old Cindy, who used to be afraid of the water, but now enthusiastically jumps in.

Horizons serves low-income students. Dana Rickman is the director of policy and research for the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, a non-partisan education think tank.  Rickman says research shows those children have a bigger disadvantage when it comes to retaining information over the summer.

“In reading and language arts for higher-income kids they lose about one month of grade-level equivalency,” Rickman says, “But for lower-income kids, they lose approximately three months per summer of grade-level mastery of skills.”