New summer school programs at Arlington Public Schools are hoping to find success where other efforts have fallen short.
Two new pilot programs are meant to help measure the impact of different learning models — and perhaps improve on mediocre results from summer school programs in 2024.
“The previous way we had our summer school was not yielding positive results, so we’re trying something new,” Superintendent Francisco Durán said in a presentation to School Board members last week.
New for 2025 are:
- A “summer skills boost” effort targeting about 1,600 students in kindergarten through seventh grade with self-paced, online instruction in math, reading and language areas. About one-third of participants also are receiving active monitoring by staff.
- A tutoring program for students at Drew, Barcroft and Hoffman-Boston elementary schools and Dorothy Hamm Middle School, with about 110 students receiving math and literacy support.
The new initiatives will give the school system “the opportunity to measure the impact of various summer-learning models to help us think forward about summer 2026,” Durán said.
Assessment tests at the start of the 2024-25 school year found lackluster results in last year’s summer school programming.
The assessment compared the achievement level of students who took remedial courses with those who were eligible to do so, but did not. The traditional summer-school program, running from July 7 to Aug. 1, had an enrollment of about 3,000 students split between in-person and online options.
Durán told School Board members he’d provide an update on summer-school results sometime in the fall. School Board members will decide how to move forward with the program during fiscal year 2027 budget deliberations next spring.
