The Impact of Summer Programming
By Liz Curfman, Program Officer
The word “summer” might evoke a sense of time slowing down. The days being longer, summer plans, a looser schedule. But for many families, the word “summer” might evoke stress as parents are trying to cobble together childcare, while both parents work full time.
One such agency providing high-quality care for children in the summer months is AB Christian Learning Center (ABCLC). Founded in 2006 by Executive Director Loretta Burns, ABCLC is a faith-based nonprofit that provides high quality after-school and summer programs for children in Southeast Fort Worth. The agency primarily serves families who have children that are attending low-performing Title I schools. This unique, Christian agency prioritizes academics, but also quality. That quality includes supporting a whole child, including building their confidence to succeed in life. Each morning of summer programming begins with Harambe, which includes the children singing the motivational song “Something Inside So Strong.” Quite often, children who are not performing well academically do not have the confidence to believe they can succeed academically. This small, but important feature of each morning instills that confidence and motivation to keep going, to achieve, and succeed. According to Loretta “Our goal is to reach families who cannot afford a quality summer learning program for their children who would otherwise be home unsupervised.”
ABCLC provides services in community churches in the area. In the summer months, services consist of a structured reading programming, as well as field trips to children enrolled in programming. In these summer months, this type of academic enrichment is important for children. Whether it’s to prevent children from falling behind, or helping them catch up to their peers, these environments also provide a different learning environment. With the smaller class sizes that are observed at ABCLC’s summer locations, this can help children thrive. This more individualized attention means that children are receiving the support they need from caring adults. Those adults are a mixture of college interns that are from the community being served, teachers from the community, as well as senior citizens from the community. It truly takes a village to support children, and ABCLC is doing just that.
But academics isn’t where the support for these children ends, in fact, the agency provides breakfast, lunch, and snacks free of charge to the children. Loretta emphasizes that “Many of the scholars we serve would not have access to nutritional meals during those summer days.” Therefore the agency provides those meals to the children every day of programming, which is six weeks, seven hours a day, all for children Kindergarten through 12th.
The Rees-Jones Foundation is proud to support agencies such as AB Christian Learning Center as they support working families, which in turn supports their children. No matter what the word “summer” means to you, we can all agree it is an important, and valuable time to care for children in North Texas.