Summer for All

In 2011, The Wallace Foundation launched the National Summer Learning Project (NSLP) to expand summer program opportunities for students in urban districts and to study the effectiveness of district-led summer programs and how they could be well implemented. Through the NSLP, The Wallace Foundation has provided support to public school districts and their community partners in Boston; Dallas; Duval County, Florida; Pittsburgh; and Rochester, New York. In 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a consensus study report regarding summer experiences and how they shape the development and well-being of children and youth. One of the key recommendations in the report is for cities and counties to take a comprehensive, communitywide approach to ensuring that the needs of their children and youth are adequately met during the summer. As the NSLP wound down, some districts and their community partners turned their attention and efforts toward sustaining their progress in promoting program scale and quality. To further sustainability, some of these districts and their partners are part of regional networks working to expand opportunities for quality summer programming in their cities. In this report, the eighth in RAND's Summer Learning Series, the authors chronicle the early efforts of community leaders to create coordinated approaches to increasing access to quality summer programming, noting their challenges, enablers, and early outcomes. The report is intended to help cityand county leaders, district leaders, out-of-school time intermediaries, and other community organizations launch and sustain such coordinated networks.