Education

It’s back to school week.  And for about 2 to 3 percent of New Hampshire students, learning will begin or continue in the home.

Two laws that went into effect this summer give families who home-school a lot more independence than they’ve had in the past.

This week the Department of Education says it will release details of New Hampshire’s application for a waiver for flexibility from the controversial federal education law, No Child Left Behind. The DOE will release a draft on Thursday, and submit the final waiver application to the federal department of education the following week.

For most New Hampshire students Tuesday or Wednesday is the first day of school. For some New Hampshire schools “day-one” really is day-one.

For those kids headed starting classes tomorrow, like Andrew Pollak, emotions are mixed.

"It’s gonna be scary but fun," says Pollock, "because who knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow, it could be anything!"

This week NHPR is taking a look at the impacts of summer learning loss: the things that students forget during summer vacation. Yesterday we heard about how this hits low-income students harder than others, and today we look at what schools and parents are doing to tackle learning loss.

In just a few short weeks, summer vacation will come to a close, and when it does teachers will start the school year off with a familiar routine: review.

It may sound like no big deal, but over the summer students forget so much of their schooling over vacation that it’s come to be called “summer learning loss.” In the first of a three part series about the summer slide, NHPR’s Sam Evans-Brown tells us why summer activities have a lot to do with how students fare during the rest of the year.