The Educational Initiative: Giving Kids an Academic Boost

As the MCAS test and budget cuts have forced school systems to tighten their schedules and limit their course offerings, summer camp can play a lead role in offering young people a variety of hands-on, real-world learning experiences. This kind of experiential learning often motivates and engages youth in unprecedented ways. The Summer Fund supports a wide range of camps, all providing various levels of educational programming to the children they serve. Over the last several years the Summer Fund has been developing a program that will support camp efforts to provide services that address the “whole child” while building on their academic programming capacity. The primary goal of the Educational Initiative is to provide camps with a variety of support options that will help them start, improve and/or expand the educational programming they offer and resources that will allow them to infuse learning into their recreational activities. This effort is not meant to pressure camps into changing their mission to include a strict academic focus.

In 2000, the Educational Initiative was a single pronged project that supported ten camps. In 2003, the Initiative consisted of four components that impacted the vast majority of the 70 Summer Fund supported camps. Because the camps vary on so many levels, from large and small, overnight and day camps, to arts and academic based camps, developing an initiative that is helpful to every camp has been challenging and will take some time. However, throughout the years the Summer Fund has worked closely with several organizations and most importantly listened to the feedback and advice of camp staff. Through the Summer Fund Educational Initiative camps now have a variety of efficient, cost-effective educational support options, which can be adapted to meet a camp’s specific mission and need.

The plan for the 2004 Summer Fund Educational Initiative includes four components: Outstanding Volunteer mini-grants, Books-In-Bulk, Summer Fund Institute, and a collaborative environmental program.