Legos & murals: How Boise’s libraries can help your kids fight learning loss this summer
Building straw rockets, germinating seeds in a bag, building a paper plate maze for marbles, and using Wikki Stix to draw letters – these are just some of the events the Boise Public Library hosted last summer to help combat COVID-19 learning loss among kids in the community.
Now the library is on track to double down on these efforts, thanks to a $10,000 grant that the City Council approved March 5. The grant is administered by the Idaho Commission for Libraries and paid for with state and federal education funds. The library received a larger version of the grant – $30,000 – for the first time in 2023.
With programs that “allow students to learn while having fun,” library officials hope that “students who might not thrive during traditional schooling will realize learning outcomes during the summer that will better position them to return to school in the fall,” officials wrote in their application for the grant.
The challenges are formidable: Standardized test scores are down, kids are behind on their social-emotional development, and many Boise-area families are stressed by a rising cost of living, leaving them with fewer resources to access the reading materials or summer enrichment programs their children need. These effects are felt most strongly among underserved groups such as children from low-income families, children with disabilities, English-language learners, and migrant students.
Idaho students were hitting “historically low” performance rates in math last summer, a State Board of Education official told Idaho Education News in June. In 2023, 41.5% of students scored proficient or higher on the math portion of the Idaho Standards Achievement Test, falling short of the state’s goal of 61.5% proficiency, and 2019’s 44.4% proficiency rate.
For Idaho students in kindergarten through third grade, reading proficiency dropped to 66.6% from 2022’s 69.1%, Idaho Education News reported in October.
In 2022, State Superintendent Sherri Ybarra said Idaho’s schools would be trying to recover from pandemic-related learning loss for years.
In response, the Boise library system plans to expand the programs it started last summer to make learning “fun and engaging” and “stretch outside the bounds of traditional education,” officials wrote in their application. These include hiring two interns to help travel to summer camps, schools, parks, and summer support programs that work with refugee students and families, Joshua Letsinger, the library’s communications manager, wrote in an email to the Idaho Statesman.
The outreach team hosted story times to model reading books out loud to the children, and gave away books for kids to take home and start their own home library – “an important part of early literacy,” Letsinger wrote.
The library aims to meet kids where they are – for example, by hosting events at Boise summer school sites, or doing weekly pop-up programming at parks where the city’s Parks and Recreation Department is already offering free meals. In summer 2023, outreach at city parks reached over 800 children, library officials wrote in their grant application.
“These efforts are incredibly important to support early literacy and build confidence in our youth,” Letsinger wrote. “This grant helped remove some of the barriers that keep people from accessing resources that the library provides.”
