While efforts to retrain workforce and grow new businesses are necessary there is a huge gap in our preparation of the workforce of tomorrow.  The statistics are crushing.  In a time when our entire workforce needs to improve their skills to face the challenges of the new technological age, we are letting skill sets atrophy in those we will rely on to carry us forward.

Did You Know?

According to the National Summer Learning Association spawned by Johns Hopkins University …

• All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).
• Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).
• 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 (Alexander et al, 2007).

Read More … 

In and effort to close this gap, R’Club, which provides full day preschool, before and after school, and extended learning programs for over 3,500 youth, established the Summer Bridge Project.

In an earlier post,  Crowd Fund our Future, we highlighted this effort to use private sector crowd funding, matched by PNC and BB&T, to help close this gap.  The effort was tasked specifically to fund reading materials for this program, in short order, in conjunction with Cause to Fund, a local organization that utilizes crowd funding to support charities.

The effort was effective, raising over $6,300 in a little over a month.  For R’Club and for our community, the Summer Books reading fundraiser is a great success!!