As we who live in LA County are aware, LAUSD has been driven to drop the notion of summer school almost altogether and to shorten the school year, all in the name of budget cutting.
In Wednesday’s Huffington Post, the Coalition Director of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater LA, Kaile Schilling writes about the how the loss of summer school has many more costs to it than simply educational:
Our schools remain one of our most valuable tools for reaching young people on every level – academic education, social education, nutrition, and violence prevention. No one issue is an island, and a cut in one area can have a substantive impact in unexpected places. The reduction of summer classes and programs for 150,00 kids, for instance, means thousands of low-income children who relied on subsidized school lunches are left wondering where their next meal is coming from, as the LA Times recently reported.
It’s not only school kids who are impacted: so is everyone in Los Angeles. All the research agrees: Good schools mean a safer society. Simply put, kids who stay in school are less likely to commit crimes. A 2006 study by research group Bridgeland, DiIulio & Morison found that kids who drop out of high school are more than eight times as likely to wind up in jail or prison.
Read the rest here.