LYNN — It’s education slang for a drop-off in students’ acquired academic skills and Lynn Public Schools (LPS) plan to fight the “covid slide” with help from the state and an education foundation.
Superintendent Dr. Patrick Tutwiler announced during Thursday’s School Committee meeting that the district plans to launch a new enrichment and remediation resource later this month for all Kindergarten-Grade 5 students through the use of an online program called Spatial-Temporal (ST) Math.
ST Math is a visual instructional program that leverages the brain’s innate spatial-temporal reasoning ability to solve mathematical problems. The program’s unique approach provides students with equitable access to learning the state’s math standards through challenging puzzles, non-routine problem solving, and informative feedback.
The city’s school district was awarded a grant to fund its use of the program, which was made available through a partnership between The Mind Institute, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), Mass STEM Hub and funding from The One8 Foundation.
“The One8 Foundation has stepped up to provide ST Math at no cost to Massachusetts schools for this summer and into the 2020-21 school year to help prevent what is known as the summer slide where students lose information or skills taught during the summer months,” said Tutwiler. “With ST Math, students build deep conceptual understanding and there’s data to back it up.”
Lynn was one of 38 school districts that applied to be considered for the program this summer. The expanded offering of ST Math is part of the “2020 Math Initiative,” which was developed to help mitigate both summer learning loss and the “COVID slide,” according to a press release from The One8Foundation.
According to a report published in April 2020 by NWEA, student progress in math is at greatest potential risk for a “COVID slide,” and students could return to school in the fall “with less than 50 percent of the learning gains, and in some grades, nearly a full year behind what we would observe in normal conditions.”
Students can minimize the effect of the COVID slide by using ST Math for the recommended number of minutes each week, which is 60 minutes for K-1 students and 90 minutes for those in grades 2-5, said Shirley Albert-Benedict, LPS assistant director of Curriculum and Instruction for Math K-12.
District staff is currently working to enroll all Kindergarten through Grade 5 students in the ST Math program and aims for it to be accessible by June 15. Teachers and principals will be reaching out to families to ensure students get their log-in information, Albert-Benedict said.
The One8 Foundation began funding the ST Math Massachusetts Program in 2017 with an initial cohort of 54 Massachusetts schools. Over the past two years, the program grew to encompass 165 schools, totaling approximately 55,000 students, according to the One8 press release.
One8 Foundation has provided additional support for the quality implementation of ST Math for schools receiving grants through Mass STEM Hub, their school implementation team, according to the release.
“We’re glad to see ST Math become an option for additional Massachusetts schools this summer, especially as we all look for ways to maintain student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic,” DESE Commissioner Jeffrey Riley said in a statement. “I am grateful to One8 Foundation, Mass STEM Hub and MIND Research Institute for making this opportunity available.”
