Learning Academy 2017: The Second Summer

Eighteen second- and third-graders were the entire second class. A year earlier, BASIC had run its first Reading Academy for twenty-one students as an experiment; this was the test of whether it could be done again. It could — thirty-one students in total enrolled across the program that July, and all thirty-one finished it.

Full-day classes began July 13, 2017, and ran for four weeks at the Steele-Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center — a repeat of the same “school without walls” structure from 2016, now with a full second and third grade cohort instead of a founding handful.

Free breakfast and lunch every day. Door-to-door bus service. Books to keep. The daily rhythm held: students who had fallen behind during the school year worked with two trained teachers and two instructional aides, in small groups, for the better part of a month.

What the numbers said

Ninety-eight and a half percent overall attendance — nearly every student, nearly every day, for four weeks of summer. The eighteen children about to enter third and fourth grade were tested at the start of the program and again at the end, the same before-and-after measure the first Reading Academy had used.

Students enrolled

31

Students completed

31

Overall attendance

98.5%

Program length

4 weeks, 20 days

Free t-shirts, backpacks and an attendance incentive kept the momentum going. A headmaster managed the logistics; the teachers ran the classroom. It was, by every measure BASIC was tracking, a program that worked a second time.