Updated July 26, 2025 at 11:08 AM CDT
It's a sweltering summer day in early July, and 13-year-old Ra'laya Myers is thrilled to be at school in North Philadelphia.
"Everybody is like, literally, family here," she says. "It's a safe space."
Ra'laya is one of about 5,200 School District of Philadelphia students attending the Summer Achievers program, a free six-week summer camp for rising first- through eighth-graders.
"You're not just sitting here learning like it's regular school. You're having fun while you're learning," she says. "So you're never going to be bored here."
Each day begins with about four hours of math and English language arts instruction, while the afternoons are reserved for fun activities ranging from arts and crafts to drama and sports. Campers also go on weekly field trips to places like an aquarium.
This program didn't exist before the pandemic.
Like many districts across the country, the School District of Philadelphia responded to learning losses during school closures by expanding its summer programs to help students recover. The district used federal pandemic relief funding to do it — and it's not alone.
In total, the federal government provided schools with about $10 billion to support after-school and summer learning programs between 2021 and 2024, according to the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance.
But that funding has mostly expired, meaning schools now have to choose between scaling back or finding other ways to pay for summer programs.
There's evidence many schools are opting to stay the course: A national survey of more than 400 superintendents by the National Summer Learning Association, the School Superintendents Association and Gallup found 66% of respondents planned to keep summer learning spending unchanged from the previous year, while 16% planned to increase it. About 18% reported they would decrease spending on summer learning this year.
Recently, districts got hit with another curveball, when the Trump administration announced it was pausing more than $6 billion in federal education grants. Last week, the administration said it intends to release the grant funding specifically for summer and after-school programs. But with those specific funding streams zeroed out in President Trump's proposed budget for fiscal year 2026, the future of federal funding for this kind of education programming remains uncertain.
Collaboration is key
To sustain its Summer Achievers program once the federal funding went away, the School District of Philadelphia teamed up with the city. Combined, the city and the district are spending roughly $9.5 million on this summer's programming.
"We are so lucky that our district and our city both recognized that this cannot be something that is completely lost," said Abbey Gunn, executive director for the Office of Student Life at the School District of Philadelphia.
The program operates out of 59 school buildings; the district provides the teachers and instructional materials and supplies, while the city contracts with local nonprofits that offer fun activities for campers.
Gunn explains that collaboration is essential to the program, which pairs nonprofit employees with district teachers.
"Each of the adults in the classroom has a specific area of expertise that they're able to leverage and complement one another with," Gunn says.
In a Summer Achievers classroom of rising seventh- and eighth-graders, Cheryl Brown, an employee with the nonprofit Launch of Philadelphia, works closely with middle school teacher Julia Gerson.
Gerson leads the students in reading and math instruction, and Brown steps in intermittently to lead "brain breaks," or short games that allow students to recharge and refocus on learning.
"They just need that five, 10 minutes to just like, you know, just shake the willies off," Brown says. "And then they're ready to get back to work."
While Brown isn't the classroom teacher, she's part of the learning process.
"One thing my kids love … I just write random words on 3-by-5 cards and flash it to them. … They love shouting out the words. They love learning new words. You know, my kids love everything," Brown says.
School District of Philadelphia math teacher Eric Domzalski knows budgets are tight, but he says the investment in Summer Achievers is worth it. At the summer camp, he teaches rising fifth- and sixth-graders alongside Launch of Philadelphia employee Amir Simmons. Domzalski says attendance at the camp is high and students show up ready and excited to participate.
"They're learning math, reading, but also life lessons that we're teaching them every single day," he says. "So they're getting everything here, and also they're having fun."
Boston as a model
The Summer Achievers program is modeled after a long-running initiative in Boston that embeds academic instruction into summer activities.
"In Boston, we have tried to make the entire city a classroom, so we're focused on every neighborhood," says Chris Smith, executive director of Boston After School & Beyond, an organization that connects the city of Boston, Boston Public Schools and a vast network of nonprofit groups.
Boston teachers are paired with employees from nonprofit groups who, for example, take students sailing in the Boston Harbor. The boating is paired with math lessons that relate to sailing.
"There's a range of approaches — from programs that are within walking distance from a young person's home, surrounded by people from their community … all the way to going to a place they've never been," Smith says.
Smith's organization uses survey data and other metrics to evaluate the success of these programs.
Data from last summer shows that the nearly 17,000 students who took part in a summer learning program had an average attendance rate of approximately 86%; staff reported that students experienced growth in critical thinking, relationships with peers and adults, and communication skills. Students also reported feeling challenged — in a good way — and said they felt they were surrounded by supportive adults and peers.
Smith is currently working with the city of Philadelphia to develop similar metrics for the Summer Achievers program.
Effective summer learning programs
It's too soon to know what impact the Summer Achievers program in Philadelphia will have on its participants. But Megan Kuhfeld, a research scientist with NWEA — a K-12 assessment and research organization — says the program "checks almost all the boxes" of what the research suggests are best practices.
She says effective summer learning programs should be easily accessible to families, include academics, be at least six weeks long and provide full-day child care. Also, she says, they should be fun.
"If summer school or summer learning programs look too much like school, kids are not interested in going, and they have to actually go [for] any of the benefits academically to show up," Kuhfeld says.
The broader research on summer learning suggests programs that meet these criteria can have positive but modest effects on student achievement, according to an analysis conducted by Kuhfeld.
Boston was one of several cities included in a national study by the RAND Corporation roughly a decade ago. It concluded there was promising evidence showing students with high attendance in these programs over two consecutive summers outperformed their peers in math, English Language Arts and social emotional learning.
Thirteen-year-old Ra'laya Myers says Summer Achievers offers her something she didn't get in school last year.
"In like regular school, I had a hard time, like getting along with people and stuff. But summer camp teaches me how to be a leader, and how good, like, I am at being a leader."
When asked where she'd be if she weren't in the program, Ra'laya says she'd "probably [be] in the house, bored, not doing nothing, not going outside, not having a team to work with, not looking forward to stuff every morning."
Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Audio story produced by: Janet Woojeong Lee
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