With peers on vacation, some Fairfax Co. kids use spring break to catch up

Hannah Primrose sat in a chair at the front of a classroom at Pine Spring Elementary in Virginia on Thursday afternoon, leading kindergarten students in an exercise to reflect on their recent field trip.

Primrose usually teaches older kids, but as part of a spring break program that offers selected students a chance to catch up, she’s working with the younger group. She helped them complete sentences and then read them out loud.

“At the Botanic Garden, we saw a coconut,” the class said together.

Then, she asked what shape coconuts are.

“Shape is circle,” the kindergarteners excitedly replied.

The Falls Church school is one of over 30 Fairfax County, Virginia, campuses offering small groups of students the chance to make up for lost time during spring break. Students who have missed a significant amount of school are invited, but not required, to participate.

In some cases, the work is called “Spring Sprouts,” focusing on Title I elementary schools where students have missed enough class to be considered “chronically absent.”

At certain middle schools, the “Spring Forward” initiative helps prepare students before the end-of-year Standards of Learning exams.

The Blooming Readers program, meanwhile, targets students in third grade or higher who need extra support to get to the point where they’re reading at grade level.

“There’s something about being able to bend down next to every kid and really talk to them about what is making them want to come to school, what makes them excited to come to school,” Principal Nicole Yacubovich said. “How we can continue this momentum, because we’ve had fantastic attendance this week for children who may have been striving in that area in the past.”

At Pine Spring, students attended classes Monday through Thursday of this week. They arrived at 8:30 a.m., had breakfast together, and then spent time in classrooms. The program has the structure of a normal school day, Yacubovich said, with a focus on reading and math.

Many students missed class because of a bad flu season this year, Yacubovich said, so the kindergarten and first grade programming targeted kids who are close to missing 10% or more of school days in an academic year.

Their efforts similarly prioritized students with difficulties in third grade reading.

“Because we wanted to make sure that we could give them that final boost, to make sure that they’re on grade level by the end of that third grade year,” Yacubovich said. “We know it’s critical for their long-term success.”

Alessandra, who’s in third grade, said she’s been learning about prefixes and suffixes.

Her classmate, Jessia, said it’s been helpful to spend time in a school environment with fewer distractions.

“I don’t hear most people talking about random stuff,” she said.

The younger students, meanwhile, enjoyed the field trip to the Botanic Garden. Antonella said she “watched the flowers grow a little bit,” and she’s also improved her counting and math skills.

Khristopher appreciated learning about plants, specifically the “garden and vegetables and flowers,” he said.

Yacubovich said Pine Spring has about 80 kids in its spring break week program, and she’s expecting it to have a major impact.

“It really is going to help us move them forward and let us, as administrators, connect with them a little bit more on a personal level,” Yacubovich said.

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