Ahh, summer. Most of us look forward to it, unless we’re the ones figuring out how to entertain children and staff our programs over the summer. Everything that needs to be done to prepare is overwhelming. Luckily, the National Afterschool Association (NAA) posted a blog article in December with a couple of new tools that were developed with the help of the RAND Corporation and the Wallace Foundation.
This 90-page report is all about best practices for planning and staffing your summer program. The nice part about this report is that the RAND Corporation made sure to summarize the report’s recommendations within the first 16 pages. Although the recommendations are great, you may want to read through the rest of the report to see how researchers came to those recommendations. Each person and program will have their own take-aways, but here are ten things that stand out.
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The second tool featured in NAA’s article was the Summer Learning Toolkit in which the Wallace Foundation mapped RAND’s findings from the “Getting to Work on Summer Learning” report. This toolkit features 50 different tools in the following categories: Planning and Management, Academics and Enrichment, Staffing and Professional Development, Site Climate, and Student Recruitment and Attendance. Even if you have been running a successful summer program for years, you may find that some of these tools are helpful and can help you take your program to the next level.
Planning a summer program is hard work. It’s no easy task to plan staffing, curriculum, sites, schedules, and student recruitment. Let researchers with the RAND Corporation and the Wallace Foundation help make it a little easier. Let Eleyo help make the registration, invoicing, attendance, and reporting easier for your summer program.