Get Ready For........Summer

Yes, it's the last day of February, spring is coming, and it just occurred to me........high time to start thinking about summer programming. Charlie does have Extended School Year provided by the school district for six weeks. It's just in the morning, which is both a good thing (it is summer, and a desire to be lazy and looser appeals) and a potential harbinger of fretfulness, and not only in me but in Charlie, whose preference (need) for routine, order, and the reassurance generated by these has been greater than ever. (That adolescence thing again---really, it's starting to seem that adolescence is the be-all and end-all of Charlie's woes these days.)

ESY for Charlie starts at 9am (good---our household seems ever on the verge of being done in with the need to meet the bus by 7.30am) and ends at 1pm. So he's got the better part of the afternoon off. Jim (with the magnum opus done) is contemplating a summer of outdoor "Dad 'n' Son" time; Charlie and I have filled the days with walks, swimming, and random trips to here and there (there's often a trip to Target on hot thundercloudy days when there is nothing left to do). I am contemplating having Charlie attend camp at our YMCA, with kids his age. Often in our days swimming there in the summer, we've seen campers lining up to use the pool slide. It can be pretty chaotic---Charlie is going to need an aide, regardless, and we may only have him attend the camp for an abbreviated period of time, at least to start.

The aide would have to be provided (found and trained and paid) by us; I do think the experience would be very worth it. Summer has always been a bit of a scramble for us and we're not alone among families: CBS21 (Pennsylvania) reported yesterday about the effects faced by more than 800 children and their families due to cuts in the Summer Therapeutic Activities Program, or STAP. In previous years, STAP has run for nine weeks; it's being shortened to five weeks:

The Capital Behavioral Health Collaborative oversees STAP, and covers Cumberland, Dauphin, Lancaster, Lebanon, and Perry Counties. Over the last two years, the counties have lost 14-million dollars.

Since the state only requires counties to provide 5 weeks of STAP, CBHC decided to make the cuts there. STAP offers hundreds of kids in our area a chance to play games, enjoy physical activities, even field trips once a week. And it keeps them involved at a level that is crucial for their emotional, behavioral, and educational progress.

Parents are worried all of that will fall away with the shortened program.

"Those skills that you worked on the last school year will regress - and some of them disappear in a three month time period."

I know budgets have been frozen in our school district and am just hoping that the student-to-teacher will remain the same. Elsewhere----in Wayne County in Michigan, to cite one place---a "serious shortfall in money" is threatening a county-wide program for special education students. It's always a jaw-dropping moment for me at an end of the school year IEP meeting to hear a case manager say "well, in summer, we are just trying to maintain skills; summer is not the time to acquire new ones."

Who says learning is supposed to get put on hold just because it's summer?

Summer can be a make-or-break-time---and most everyone thinking that summer = relaxation and fun makes it all the harder. So I'm glad I've started worrying now, and planning. And budgeting.