Summer is often anything but a vacation for the more than half of Sarasota County school students who come from low-income households. Instead of a time to build new experiences or attend enriching summer camps, it's often a period when children and families struggle to afford even the most basic necessities and opportunities to improve learning.

Lack of access to stimulating learning activities leads to a measured reality called summer learning loss, when students lose academic skills during their time away from school. This loss contributes many debilitating effects to a young person's success in school. It's also a key reason why the achievement gap between children from low-income households grows even greater between their peers from medium and high-income households. 

In 2013, the Community Foundation of Sarasota County met donors Joe and Mary Kay Henson who had a vision that students in poverty, given equal opportunity and resources, could perform as well as their higher income peers. We partnered with them on a pilot program for rising kindergartners at Alta Vista Elementary School, a Title 1 school, to prove that philanthropy could fund and learn from an experimental model to help combat summer learning loss. A six-week Summer Learning Academy was born, dubbed the Eagle Academy, to provide additional educational opportunities for the students of the inaugural class. Not only were academic activities offered, but food, books and a student emergency fund to provide clothing, healthcare and other assistance for the students and their families were available as well as enrichment activities. 

The pilot program improved academic skills, school engagement, motivation and relationships with adults and peers, just the outcomes we hoped would happen. Armed with compelling success, the Hensons persuaded the Sarasota County School District to expand the academies to more Title 1 schools: Emma E. Booker, Tuttle and Gocio elementary schools in the following years. The academies proved the average iReady scores (an adaptive assessment tool used by Sarasota County Schools that uses scale scores to track student growth and performance) for SLA students went up higher than their peers who did not attend a summer learning program, with learning gains in excess of 30 weeks for some students.

With greater knowledge from the pilot academies, we also incorporated a two-generation approach to ensure the students' parents also benefit from the academies. Parents who enroll their children for the SLA also attend weekly "parent universities," designed to instruct them on a variety of topics such as financial sustainability, nutritional cooking, building social capital and navigating the educational system. 

We couldn't be more proud of the success of these academies, not just because of the impact they have had in the lives of local students, but also because of the way these SLA models have evolved and expanded. After funding and creating the proof points that these academies work through philanthropy, the Sarasota County School District has now secured the state funding required to establish Summer Learning Academies in all eleven Title 1 schools across our county this summer.

This means more than 1,100 elementary school students currently receive enriched summer learning opportunities and their parents are afforded the relief of knowing their children are in a safe learning environment for six weeks over the summer. It is apparent that when a child's physiological and safety needs are not met, it becomes difficult for them to focus on their social and academic well-being, as well as difficult for a teacher to engage with them in the classroom. Knowing these academies are in place means many of our region's students are on a path to a brighter future. 

The vision of donors like Joe and Mary Kay Henson is behind this great milestone—people who believe in giving our most vulnerable students an opportunity to empower themselves through education. Investing in people to further their education is one of the best investments one can make for lifelong success.

Roxie Jerde is president and CEO of the Community Foudnation of Sarasota County.