Horry County Schools offers programs to combat summer learning loss for K-12 students

HORRY COUNTY, S.C. (WBTW) — Horry County Schools go back to school in less than two weeks.

But you may not know that over the course of a summer, K-12 students can lose up to about one month’s worth of learning.

The director of communications for HCS, Lisa Bourcier, said there are summer reading programs available to help avoid this.

In the summer 2021, HCS served 4,232 more kindergarten through third-grade students than in 2020.

“Students are doing good,” Bourcier said. “They are. They’re ready to come back to school, they’re ready to learn and we’re excited to have them back in our school buildings and, you know, start the school year.”

Bourcier said since COVID, the schools have added courses and additional personnel to assist with the learning loss over the past few years.

“We’ve received three different allocations of Esser funds since the pandemic,” Bourcier said. “We’re coming up on our last funding source which will have to been spent by September 2024 and over 20% of that has to be used for academic learning.”

She said they have seen this to be beneficial throughout the schools.

“We’ve been able to maintain our interventionists, which have been placed in most of our schools, to help those get back on track,” Bourcier said.

Bourcier said all state assessments are mandatory, but depending on your grade level, are taken throughout the school year.

She said often times these are at the beginning of the school year to see what they have retained over the summer, and then one after the new year and one towards the end of the school year.

“We’re doing better than the state average and even reaching out to the nation averages as well,” Bourcier said. “We always have more work to do but we’re excited to get back to business starting in August.”

HCS scored 10% or higher in each subject last year for their end-of-year course exams. Bourcier said they offer academic enrichment programs throughout both the school year and summer, including tutoring for small group and individual sessions.

For more information on the parent portal link to keep up with your child’s grades and in contact with their teacher to schedule parent-teacher conferences, click here.