San Diego, CA – July 2, 2018 – Peachjar, the nation’s leading digital flyer system that empowers more than 12,000 K-12 schools to connect parents with the necessary resources to enrich the lives of their children, has announced the launch of the “Digital Summer” site designed to combat summer learning loss. The site, which features resources from leading providers such as Khan Academy, Scholastic, Babbel, Hour of Code, and Vocabulary.com, is a free digital repository accessible to all learners. Parents and children can access the Digital Summer site here: https://peachjar.com
In a given year, a child is awake for 5,000 hours and spends just 1,000 of those hours in school, leaving 4,000 hours of opportunity. A large percentage of this time comes during summer break. In conceiving of the Digital Summer site, the driving question for Peachjar was, “How do we help parents and children take advantage of this valuable time and find enriching opportunities to develop the whole child and prevent the ‘summer slide?’” The site aims to keep students mentally active over summer vacation and reduce damaging summer learning loss, which results in students losing a month of academic progress, on average, between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next.
“Stopping summer learning loss is one of the clearest ways to ensure that all children make significant academic progress over time,” said Cara Aley, COO of Peachjar. “With Peachjar’s Digital Summer, we offer free and easy-to-access online learning opportunities for K-12 students, designed to place all children on an even playing field with academic support during the long summer months.”
The “summer slide” affects most learners, but has a particularly negative impact on children from lower-income households, who may be less likely to the opportunity to participate in summer programs, such as camps, compared to more affluent peers. Providing free, accessible learning opportunities is an essential piece of advancing education equity for all.
The website has content focused on technology, world languages, math, reading, science and more, and has targeted resources for elementary, middle, and high school students. As few as two or three hours per week engaging with learning activities over the summer can reverse summer learning loss.
To illustrate the damaging effects of, and promising interventions for, summer learning loss, Peachjar has created an infographic with compelling statistics on the topic: https://bit.ly/2jJCms5
Key findings include:
- Summer programs increase the amount of time students spend engaged in learning activities by 30-35 percent.
- On average, K-12 students lose one month of instruction over summer vacation, and are one month behind where they performed in the spring.
- Re-teaching forgotten materials annually costs $1.5K per student, and can cost $18K over the course of a typical student’s K-12 experience.
“There is compelling, urgent evidence that summer learning loss is extremely damaging to children’s educational progress, yet addressable through intentional summer programs,” said Aley. “We’re excited to introduce Digital Summer to families nationwide and hope teachers will be able to see the difference in September.”
About Peachjar
Peachjar, the nation’s leading digital flyer system for more than 12,000 K-12 schools in North America, empowers schools and organizations with the tools to connect parents with the necessary resources to enrich the lives of their children. The company’s cloud-based system enables partnerships between schools, communities and parents by making it easier to organize, distribute and receive information about extracurricular and enrichment activities. Founded in 2013, the company has helped school districts save more than two billion sheets of paper and more than $36K per school, per year. Peachjar is currently used by thousands of schools and community organizations in the US and reaches more than 7 million parents. For more information visit https://www.peachjar.com.