Arizona Summer Library Programs

Benefits

The benefits of participating in a summer library program include:

• reading over the summer helps children keep up their skills
• increased access to library resources to explore interests 
• reluctant readers can be drawn in by the activities
• participants often return to summer library programs year after year, building reading into their summer routine

Resolution on ensuring summer reading programs for all children and teens

Citing numerous benefits of summer reading programs, the American Library Association Council adopted the Resolution on ensuring summer reading programs for all children and teens (PDF) at the 2010 Annual Conference urging "Library Directors, Trustees, School Board members and supervising government bodies to ensure that their libraries are provided adequate funding to ensure that their summer reading programs for all children and teens are maintained."

Equity and Access

Public libraries serve as vital community partners. As described in the February 4, 2022 issue of the Scholastic EduBlog, Public Libraries in Summer – the Community Bridge to Families by Aaron P. Dworkin and Liz McChesney, "Public libraries are committed to equity and access, and as such offer drop-in summer programs that focus on reading for joy, engaging reluctant readers and access, all of which are free and available to the entire community."

Summer Slide

As research from the National Summer Learning Association points out, all young people who do not engage in educational activities over the summer experience some learning loss.  This learning loss is even more pronounced for low-income students.  Low-income students lose more than two months in math skills and reading achievement and the cumulative effect is a crisis in the making.  By the fifth grade, summer learning loss can leave low-income students two-and-a-half to three years behind their peers. 

Oxford Learning provides these even more sobering statistics:

• More than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate from high school or enter college.
• By the end of 6^th grade, students who experience summer learning loss are an average of two years behind their peers.
• Two thirds of the income-based achievement gap is attributed to summer learning loss by the start of high school.

Libraries are valuable community partners that provide learning and reading activities, especially during the summer months.  Reading is an important element of summer learning, but the integration of activities that is focused on learning overall creates stronger high-quality opportunities to mitigate the summer slide that many families living in poverty face.  Additionally, by integrating reading and literacy into activities that center around youth passions and interests, youth are better able to engage their brains and gain skills and knowledge that stick with them over an extended period of time. (Adopting a Summer Learning Approach for Increased Impact: a YALSA Position Paper)