In medicine, we have a phrase “sick people don’t take the day off.” Similarly, children’s need for safety, structure, and learning also doesn’t take days off, let alone a few months. Summer learning loss is well studied phenomenon, and many have been pushing to change this for some time. Additionally, the goal of this project is to offer an alternative to the emergency department for problems that arise outside of standard business hours (or worse, standard school hours).
With a goal to be data driven, it can be frustrating when the ways of looking at an issue don’t comprehensively align. as seen here in von Hippel’s paper. Though, what specifically is measured and whether it’s meaningful and separable from the noisy influences of life make me think more that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Also, calling back to Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrants, we need to consider children’s interiority not just reductive statistics about learning. Although anecdotal, the transition from year round to traditional schedule of Rosa Parks School in Portland, OR was NOT welcomed by those most affected by it.
I can’t but help make an appeal to what might seem obvious. We are no longer using children en masse for agricultural labor during the summers. Many families require that all the adults in the house work to make ends meet, and childcare expenses and logistics are an extra burden during the summer. As much as I don’t want to make appeals to the Gross Domestic Product, it’s also hard to ignore the impact. “The economy sacrifices $57 billion each year in lost revenue, wages, and productivity due to overall child care issues.”
Above and beyond strict economic factors, is of course, health and safety. As shown here, health is a driver of school achievement gap, independent of health’s intrinsic value! How valuable could a school be if it were open every day? As well as overcoming the challenge of not knowing where to go!