Angelo Garcia likens our current education system to a snow globe. Everybody basically agrees on what should be the bits of educational snowflake materials – the math, science, geography, even recess. Once in a while the globe might get shaken up by demands for accountability, radically changing reading instruction, or whatever.

But in time, with hardly anyone noticing, the snowflakes quietly drift back down to what Garcia, co-founder and executive director of the Segue Institute for Learning, calls “the same inflexible, contained environment.”
With, I might add, the same lackluster results.

For 15 years, Garcia and Segue co-founder, Melissa Lourenco, have been experimenting with how to rearrange the necessary elements of education, but get past its conventional confines.

For example, kids’ summer learning loss is an accepted liability of the agrarian school calendar. For students at this school in Central Falls, the poorest community in Rhode Island, it’s dire.

On a recent, hot summer day, Lourenco took me on a tour of what initially looked like a typical, remedial summer school, with a phonics lesson here and math puzzles there.

A Spanish-dominant group of squirmy little kids hovered around a young instructor helping them unpack the meanings and feelings of emotion words. Would, for example, getting a shot at the doctor’s office make you worried, or “preocupada?” The kids erupted with anxious chatter. The adult switched easily and often between English and Spanish, to translate and commiserate.

The instructor is one of six extra adults who are either doing their teaching practicum through the Rhode Island School for Progressive Education or are completing a B.A. through College Unbound. These programs fast-track would-be teachers who need experience.

Several schools work with these programs since education badly needs more teachers, but especially teachers of color. Other than maternity leaves, Segue has had zero teacher turnover, but they’ll need new teachers eventually. For them, the extra adults helped make the student groups smaller, giving more attention to students who need as much help as they can get.

The kids in that squirmy group are incoming kindergartners getting a jumpstart on language skills, and making friends and adult allies. Few summer programs would bother with students who don’t yet need academic remediation.

The Segue summer strategy has the groups – K-8 – cycling through six “stations” Monday through Thursday. Each station lasts only 25 minutes, so they don’t have time to get bored before moving on to a new subject and place. Three stations are academic – math, English Language Arts and the social-and-emotional learning one we observed. The other three stations promote creativity and collaboration with soft-sell academics woven throughout – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), arts and crafts, and recreation, which is essentially organized recess.

Summer staff experiment beyond the regular curriculum in search of lessons that might be more effective or engaging for use during the regular school year.

On Friday, a.k.a. Fun Friday, kids go bowling, to the beach, the movies, or whatever the grant they got for the purpose can afford. It’s a huge draw.

Indeed, a fifth-grader steamed up to me singing the praises of “all the fun stuff,” while proudly assuring me that while he still had “bad behavior” feelings, “I know how to behave.” He’s apparently a handful, but strongly motivated to stay in the program.

Lourenco says the older kids moan and groan about summer school, but they come. During the regular year, Segue’s 360 urban students have a remarkably low chronic absenteeism rate, 10%. But the 120 enrolled in the summer program come almost as faithfully.

A cohort of kids referred for chronic absenteeism work with a social worker who brainstorms with the older kids about how they could get themselves to school regularly. The younger students attend the academic program to make up for lost time and learning while the social worker engages with their families, who should be getting them to school.

Other students come because they have special needs. A few come because their families badly need child care and plead their case with school officials.

Garcia insists that Segue’s is not really a summer school, “but an extension of the school year. There’s always a need to prevent regression, which is why we’re talking about a year-round school.”

Lourenco experienced year-round schooling in another state. She started “whispering” the possibility to the staff, and found them to be surprisingly open. The school would stay within their 185-day year, but take intermittent two weeks off for, say, a fall break. The breaks would be timed differently from the other public schools so families aren’t competing with the rest of the state for flights or space at the Children’s Museum.

To boot, Garcia believes such a year-round schedule would ease teacher burnout as well as staunching learning loss. Teacher burnout is as big a problem as learning loss and probably contributes to it.

That said, teachers already work more weeks than is typical, starting the first week of August. While that sounds like a deal-breaker for many, Segue’s teachers stick around and their chronic absenteeism is zero.

“Obviously,” Garcia says, “Segue is not for everybody.”

But it’s not a snow globe either.