In the depths of winter, LINC focused an eye on summer.

There is trouble ahead:

For too many Kansas City families, the view from July 4 to the start of the next school year far away in August is a bleak one, devoid of affordable child programs.

Their local school districts’ summer school sessions have ended. The options for day camps dwindle. And by August they are left with a programming desert.

Turn the Page KC and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation believe they have provided families help by bringing an online interactive summer learning guide — called InPlay — to the Kansas City area.

But to thrive, this family resource needs the interactive support and promotion by area school districts, as well as independent educational programmers.

So LINC joined with Turn the Page KC to help InPlay recruit and inform school district officials — and develop InPlay’s growing role in the Kansas City area.

A series of February luncheons in the Liberty, Center and Raytown school districts, organized by Turn the Page and LINC, helped InPlay CEO Rod Hsiao recruit multiple school districts to support the website and become interactive partners.

Kansas City Public Schools, Center, Hickman Mills, Raytown, Liberty, Park Hill, Independence and Fort Osage were among the districts that signed on or were expected to sign on.

The cost is free to families and school districts to use the site. The Kauffman Foundation has provided the seed funding to help InPlay launch the sortable catalogue of programs and build its database.

The winter meetings built on work that started last year when Turn the Page KC gathered partners in a summer education work group to develop ideas to bring relief to families in those lean summer weeks.

The work sessions gathered representatives from groups including the Kansas City Public Library, the Mid-Continent Public Library, The Kauffman Foundation, the Hall Foundation, Operation Breakthrough and LINC.

The lay of the land was established: Area school districts will likely continue with summer calendars that mostly wrap up their summer school before the July 4 holiday. And this summer, with the passage of House Bill 604 (see page 50 of the bill), the 2020-2021 regular school year cannot begin before Aug. 24.

The new law requires that Missouri districts cannot start school any sooner than 14 days before Labor Day, which is Sept. 7 in 2020. 

This means the start of the year will be one to two weeks further into August for districts that had been starting their school years by mid-August. (Kansas City Public Schools for instance started Aug. 12 in 2019.)

Here’s why the pursuit of expanded summer programming matters:

• School districts, as they work to get their families enrolled in their district programs, can help spread the word as families seek help from counselors and principals getting their children into activities during the summer’s learning gaps.

• And school districts can help Turn the Page’s summer learning group influence summer program providers outside of schools – both for-profit and non-profit – to see and realize benefits to move more of their offerings deeper into the summer and build a more robust bridge to the start of the fall school year.

• Filling out summer with more listings particularly helps families whose incomes and work demands give them few or no alternatives for daytime care for their children.

• This is important to the safety and well-being of children.

• It is important in making stimulating programming available to help those children who need the educational boost to prevent a late-summer slide in their academic progress.

• And it is important to the stability of working parents, especially single parents, who must continue working in these strained weeks.