NEIGHBORHOOD LEARNING PODS

In the summer of 2020, in response to COVID-19, Neighborhood North was the driving partner in offering the Community Summer Learning Program, which provided tutoring, STEM activities, and family engagement programs to students and their parents living in local public housing. Trails Ministries would normally have offered summer camp activities to this population, but instead we worked together to help these vulnerable students. The other partner was Big Beaver School District, which provided teachers for tutoring. This same trio of partners supported students in Learning Pods throughout the 2020-21 academic year.  Neighborhood North opened a physical space during COVID to provide a space to host our Learning Pods to serve students in the Beaver Falls school district who needed academic and structural support during COVID.  NN worked with educators and researchers to develop a plan for evaluating our work to demonstrate change in children’s learning. (With this current programming, staff was able to review changes in students’ DIBEL reading scores to determine the effectiveness of our models.).  NN hired a teaching artist and integrated arts and STEM programming into the academic structure of our Learning Pods, serving nearly 100 at-risk students in our Learning Pods during the 2020-21 academic year.