A Wood River Community YMCA Free Program
BY MONICA CARRILLO
Kids can be seen sitting outside of Bellevue Elementary School painting hearts, bright yellow suns and their names as part of their activities for the day — but they aren’t just sitting around coloring all day. They’re also learning and having fun while doing it.
SummerBridge Education Camp is a free program that is part of the Wood River Community YMCA that serves 250 students from kindergarten through fifth grade. The camp includes partnerships with College of Idaho, Blaine County School District, Far + Wise, and the Lee Pesky Learning Center to help bridge educational gaps seen in students brought through the COVID-19 pandemic. With the camp now in its fourth year, they’ve seen improvements with yearly reports, especially with students who’ve returned every year.
Jason Shearer, CEO of SummerBridge, told the Wood River Weekly that students were individually selected for participation in the SummerBridge intervention program, like the past few years, based on their 2022-23 academic performance.
The program served about 75% of all students below the 40th percentile and above the bottom 20th percentile (tier 2) and 20% of all students from the bottom 20th percentile(tier 3).
“Upon testing at the start of the 2023-24 academic year, SummerBridge students outperformed the average student in their respective grades when comparing spring scores to those upon their return in the fall,” Shearer said. “This is exceptional because we did not use a control group of students who also needed intervention, but did not participate in the program. Rather, our students, who needed intervention in the spring, outperformed the average student in the fall.”
In addition, Shearer said that last fall SummerBridge first-grade students scored 9.52 points above the average student in reading and 42.53 points above average student in math. Second-grade students scored 9.52 points above the average student in reading and 64.78 points above the average student in math and the third-grade students scored 12.20 points above the average student in reading.
Comparable testing was not available, however, for third-grade math.
“If you’re reading The New York Times or if you’re reading national columns, you’re seeing there is a lot of evidence out there that students all across the country are really in trouble and I feel really proud, really excited, that we live in a county where people took health and safety seriously during the pandemic,” Shearer said.
“I feel like our academic performance relative to other places in the country where people took health and safety seriously during the pandemic, we’re doing great.”
Prior to SummerBridge, the YMCA was running Power Scholars Academy, a six-week program similar to SummerBridge, geared toward students who need additional support in school from all of the elementary schools in the Blaine County School District. This program ran in partnership with BCSD, Y-USA and the BELL [Building Educated Leaders for Life].
With only 65 slots, however, Shearer said it “wasn’t big enough on its own” and ran Power Scholars and launched SummerBridge.
“In order to staff that program, we had to take all of our previous summer program staff and put them into SummerBridge; then we went to the College of Idaho, where one of the presidents of the College of Idaho was the former CEO of the Treasure Valley YMCA. He and I were longtime friends, and I asked him if he could help me as a YMCA to hire 20 of his students as interns,” he said.
“…So at that time, in 2021, we ran Power Scholars as a YMCA, and we ran Summer Bridge as a YMCA using our regular camp staff and interns that we hired from the College of Idaho.”
Irene Vargas, classroom aide and student studying education at Boise State University, started off through Power Scholars Academy and eventually made her way into SummerBridge, getting to see how students have been improving since the beginning of the program’s initiative.
“I’ve done every position at SummerBridge and I feel like I know all of the kids; the first-graders then are the third-graders that I’m with now and the first year that I came, they were like, ‘It was so fun and now this is my third year, I’m having so much fun. Are we still gonna go to the YMCA?’
“Like, they’re so excited to just keep coming back and it’s not like a bad thing for them. It really makes me happy.”
Vargas also said that being Hispanic has also helped students who come from a similar background as her and might have language barriers.
Although the program wasn’t able to confirm an exact number of Hispanic students through the program, Shearer said that it’s climbed to at least 80% since they started a few years ago, when it was closer to 50%.
“Growing up, I don’t think I really ever saw someone like me, like in this position, and I think, like, it really gives them an image to look forward to,” she said.
The SummerBridge Camp will continue through July 26 with full days of summer activities and curriculum to help learning objectives.
For more information about the program, go to https://www.woodriverymca.org/programs/summerbridge/.