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Q&A
Summer Rising program attendance and retention strategies
2:48:37
ยท
156 sec
Council Member Rita Joseph inquires about strategies to improve attendance and retention in the Summer Rising program. Deputy Chancellor Emma Vadehra explains the program's flexible nature and outlines efforts to enhance attendance, including:
- Improving transportation
- Moving up the admissions and application cycle
- Enhancing programming with special initiatives and field trips
- The DOE acknowledges that summer attendance differs from school-year attendance due to the program's voluntary nature.
- Efforts are being made to offer more enrichment activities and double the number of field trips compared to previous years.
- The DOE aims to make earlier offers and move down waitlists faster to engage families who are committed to the program.
Rita Joseph
2:48:37
Thank you, Chair Stevens.
2:48:38
Just a couple of follow ups on that.
2:48:41
We know this summarizing is usually the program most popular.
2:48:44
We get a lot of applications.
2:48:46
How do you sustain the students?
2:48:47
Because last year's hearing, if you recall, the attendance rates were very low and I was not very happy with that.
2:48:55
So how do we one, get all these application, yay, now we get them through the front door, how do we get them to keep coming back to the program?
Emma Vadehra
2:49:04
Thanks for the question, for the feedback from both of you at the previous hearings.
2:49:08
So a couple of quick things.
2:49:12
I just want to say I do think we think we don't expect summer rising attendance to be what school year attendance is.
2:49:21
It's a voluntary program.
2:49:23
It's a free program.
2:49:24
There are no attendance requirements.
2:49:26
That's intentional.
2:49:27
We're excited we're able to offer this very flexible program to families.
2:49:31
We could change that as we discussed, but we don't have an attendance requirement.
2:49:35
And given that we do know that families sign up potentially knowing they're going away for a few weeks over the summer, and that's fine and it fits into their schedule.
2:49:44
We also do know we have some students who only show up for very few days, and that skews what the data looks like a bit as well.
2:49:54
We know that in the last weeks of the summer, both for the summarizing portion and the CBO portion, attendance is down we think because families are more likely to be away or doing something else in So I would say I do think the attendance data, there's a lot of context behind that that we think is partly about providing families with flexible options that we're excited to give.
2:50:16
In terms of what we are doing, I'd say a few things.
2:50:19
One is we do think consistently trying to improve the transportation piece is a piece of this.
2:50:24
We do think moving up the admissions and application cycle is a piece of this.
2:50:28
It allows the families who really want this to plan earlier decisions back to families is a piece of this.
2:50:34
This year we're hopeful we'll be able to make more offers and move down the wait list faster so we get families earlier in and who really want to do this.
2:50:43
On the programming side, I would say there's a series of changes we're making ourselves and with DYCD.
2:50:49
We are looking at some special initiatives around, for example, sustainability programming and equivalent of our climate action days to make sure we have more enrichment like programming interwoven with our CBOs throughout the day.
2:51:02
We're also looking to continue to improve our field trip take up.
2:51:06
We had twice as many field trips we were able to provide last year as a couple years before, and it looks like we'll be able to do that again this year.