Our young men are anything but idle this summer.
The Bridge Golf Foundation’s commitment to closing the achievement gap is a year-round endeavor.
Academic research has shown, and any parent knows intuitively, that summer can be a tough time for families. This is especially true for low-income families, who don’t have the resources for summer camps and other programs to keep their children busy and engaged when school is out and parents are working. This might seem like a minor challenge, but it’s not, and it’s one we’re tackling every day with our summer program.
Research has shown that low-income children lose an average of two months of reading skills over the summer and don’t recover those skills, according to a recent column in The New York Times. By the end of fifth grade, this phenomenon, knows as the “summer slide,” adds up to a three-year difference in reading skills between low-income students and their wealthier peers. According to The Times, researchers “credit the summer slide for about half of the overall difference in academic achievement between lower and higher income students.”
Low-income students often go without nutritionally as well. According to the National Summer Learning Association, six out of every seven students who receive free- and reduced-price lunches lose access to them over the summer.
The young men in our summer program come to our Learning Center in Harlem every weekday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. except Thursdays, when they head to Dunwoodie Golf Course in Yonkers from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. On a typical day, our students have STEM lessons, with a focus on math (algebra, trigonometry, geometry) and hands-on physics experiments; character education, including the study and discussion of “All American Boys,” a book that deals with police violence and race; and golf education, with personalized instruction from our teaching professionals indoors with our TrackMan simulators and outdoors at Dunwoodie. We also feed them a healthy lunch.
We are working all summer to make sure our young men are moving forward, not backward. Far from sliding, they are climbing.