Isaac Martin, a rising eighth grader at Akron’s NIHF STEM Middle School, was one of about a dozen middle schoolers at Hyre Community Learning Center on a mid-July afternoon for The Chill Lab.
He’d read the summer camp’s description – an offer to “Skip the ‘crash out’ moments and learn how to handle stress, build focus and unlock your best self through high-energy challenges and low-key vibes” — and felt it looked like a fun way to spend a few weeks ahead of the new school year.
“It looked fun,” said Isaac, 13, before adding he’d been interested in learning techniques to calm down, control his emotions and be more mindful.
At Innes Community Learning Center, Piper Blue, 11, said her mother signed her up for the Fallen Fathers Foundation’s Sports & Wellness camp because it was close to their home. Then Piper discovered she liked learning basketball skills during the event’s morning hours.
“It’s been pretty good so far,” Piper, a rising sixth grader, said of the summer camp.
The camps, and others, are part of Youth Success Summit’s Fifth Quarter, a three-week camp in partnership with Akron Public Schools to continue learning opportunities over summer break.
Now in its third summer with APS, Fifth Quarter has grown from a couple of camp options to nearly a dozen for tweens and teens at Innes, East and Jennings community learning centers, I Promise School and other community spaces. Themes range from esports and culinary arts to wellness, sports, science and engineering.
Data collection on the program’s academic impacts is underway now, said YSS Executive Director Rachel Tecca, but anecdotal evidence shows a positive impact on student attendance during the school year.
The program is funded in part through grants from the GAR Foundation and Wallace Foundation.
“It’s a really great opportunity for us to take the best of the out-of-school time providers, [partner] with certified teachers in Akron Public Schools, and design three weeks of high engagement, deep learning and hopefully authentic learning where kids are sharing solutions on what they think can make a difference in the world,” Tecca said.
“We know middle schoolers are talented, bright, unbelievably creative, and so we’re really trying to unleash that,” she said.
Unleashing that looks different for each of the nearly 200 students attending a Fifth Quarter camp.
Chill Lab teaches teens coping skills to avoid drugs, tobacco
About halfway through the camp, Isaac started to find his voice — learning skills to turn his anger or frustration into focus.
For Joli Oliver, manager of prevention and social-emotional learning services at Red Oak Behavioral Health, helping kids and teens handle stress is nothing new. She does this work during the school year in Akron Public and other Summit County schools.
“We wanted to empower the kids in our camp to not only learn ways to self-regulate but also how to teach others — peers especially — how to use coping skills,” Oliver said.
On one afternoon, that looked like Jenga towers and writing on paper plates — hands-on approaches to help sixth- through eighth graders build up what they identified as mindfulness strategies. It included naming what fills their days and causes stress, including schoolwork, chores and other responsibilities.
“This is what prevention looks like,” said Oliver, who also works with students at Tallmadge High School.
“We’re trying to educate them to make better choices and have other coping skills for when they’re exposed to [vaping or tobacco products.] It doesn’t matter what they’re using – it is all a coping [mechanism].”
As those kids enter the rollercoaster of middle school, Oliver hopes they’ll remember the skills learned in camp and use them — including fidget spinners and other grounding items. After all, the younger they are when they learn these skills, she said, the stronger defenses they’ll have.
Summer camps promote student safety, learning
Kids spend about 80 percent of their childhood outside of school, Tecca said. The largest chunks of that unstructured time are the hot weather months between school years, when students can lose some of what they’ve learned in class through the “summer slide.”
That slide can widen achievement gaps between economically disadvantaged children and their wealthier peers and see test scores in math and reading flatten or drop.
Fifth Quarter hopes to help mitigate the problem for a group often left behind: middle schoolers. While summer opportunities for younger students are often easy to find, and high school students can pick up summer jobs or internships, middle schoolers, Tecca said, often had the largest gap in options, Tecca said.
Some of the kids attending Fifth Quarter were invited because they need extra support, Tecca said, while others attend YSS partner organizations throughout the school year. Others are just students whose families signed them up.
“It’s keeping kids safe, it’s keeping them engaged in healthy activities, and it’s also reducing that summer slide academically,” Tecca said.
Sports camp offers career options if ‘going pro’ falls through
At the Sports & Wellness camp, Deanna Baddley, a coach and teacher at Litchfield Community Learning Center, reminded kids to stretch and later timed them as they dribbled a basketball from one end of the gym to the other.
The camp’s goal is not just to keep kids active, Baddley said, but to get them thinking about life beyond the basketball court or football field.
“A lot of times you have athletes that say, ‘I’m going to play in the league, I’m going to the pros’ — but they don’t,” Baddley said. “Everyone doesn’t make [a professional team.] We’re trying to get them to understand that may be you, or it may not.
So think outside of sports: What is a life after school for those student athletes that don’t make it professionally?”
The camp also gives participants insights into related careers — from facility security to careers in sports media.
During afternoons at the camp, the squeaks of the gym floor are traded for clacking keyboards in the library as students research sports industry careers.
Students like Piper.
She now hopes to play on her school’s basketball team or cheer squad when she’s in seventh and eighth grades at Innes Community Learning Center. She doesn’t envision a career in either activity, but she does recognize her involvement could lead to college scholarships to help her pursue the real dream: becoming an interior designer and architect.
