Summer Camp Restoration Helped Thousands of Middle School Children, But Abbreviated Timeline of the Partial Restoration Left Thousands of Children Without Camp

Published October, 2018

CFY 2019 Funding was for One Year Only—So Thousands of Children, Families and Providers Will Face This Cut Again and Districts Set to Lose the Most Summer Programs Have High Rates of Child Poverty

Despite the well-known fact that summer camp programming can help close the achievement gap, prevent summer learning loss, and keep children safe and participating in developmentally appropriate activities while parents work in July and August, the de Blasio administration has once again failed to fund summer programs for 34,000 children for future summers, including the summer of 2019.

Summer camp programming is a critical component of the after-school system. From its inception, the City’s original Out of School Time (OST) after-school model included summer camp programs. When the de Blasio administration rebranded and expanded the system to be universal for middle school students, advocates, families, providers and children applauded this critical investment.  Unfortunately, after the first year of implementation, the approximately 34,000 middle school after-school slots created by the de Blasio administration no longer included summer camp programs for the middle school children.  This left advocates, providers, families and City Council Members advocating for their restoration year after year.

Read more about the impact this uncertainty has had on providers, children, and families, and how New York City can avoid such instability moving forward and ensure that every middle school student has access to a summer program.