Summer Day Camp (ages 6-15)

Over 150 children had an exciting summer during the 2009 summer vacation. Activities were focused on education, health & fitness, art and music appreciation, citizenship, tooling social skills and good old fashioned fun.

Concord’s Day Camp program is part of a study being done by Johns Hopkins University. Concord wanting to meet the needs of children and to accomplish that goal “signed on” to be a part of the study. JHU is looking at and evaluating how Concord could do a better job addressing learning losses experienced by children over the summer months or when children are not in school. We know that summer learning programs are critical in providing youth with safe, nurturing, and engaging environments that accelerate achievement and promote healthy development.

Know the facts:
• All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).
• Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).
• More than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate from high school or enter college (Alexander et al, 2007).
• Children lose more than academic knowledge over the summer. Most children—particularly children at high risk of obesity—gain weight more rapidly when they are out of school during summer break (Von Hippel et al, 2007).
• Parents consistently cite summer as the most difficult time to ensure that their children have productive things to do (Duffett et al, 2004).

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