Data for this report are drawn from interviews, meeting minutes, and summer program and district documents. Researchers interviewed more than 60 district staff members involved in summer programming in three school districts—Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Rochester—from November 2015 through January 2016.

The interview protocol was tailored to the interviewee’s role and addressed the following topics:

• District priorities, goals, and the alignment of these to summer programming
• Summer learning governance, planning, and program management
• Various summer programming tasks, such as budgeting and curriculum development, with a focus on how these tasks were integrated into routine district operations
• Buy-in and understanding of summer programming
• Competition for and challenges to summer programming
• Improvements to and successes in summer programming.

Conversations with one to two summer leaders in each district were the longest in duration—spanning many hours over multiple days. These summer leaders oversaw all summer programming in their districts. Some also led their districts’ centralized summer learning programs.

Researchers also interviewed principals running their own summer learning programs for their students. But interviews with centralized summer leaders served as the main sources of information for this study.