Painesville City School officials have begun planning to bring back a popular summer program they say benefited kids amid the pandemic.

Heading into the summer of 2021, officials in the district were especially concerned with learning loss caused by students missing class time amid coronavirus shutdowns and quarantines.

The district had launched the Lunch Box Truck in 2016 to provide free meals to kids under 18, but that wouldn’t address the educational situation.

So going back to the drawing board, Painesville Schools drew on another truck they had on hand, also since 2016, to help address some of the learning challenges in the community — the Book Box Truck.

“We took a school van and loaded it with gently used books, and it started with just books,” said Wendy Camper, the district’s director of teaching and learning. “Our goal then was to just put books into children’s homes. We know that’s a need in our community.”

But this past summer saw the Book Box Truck evolve, just as many services and aspects of life had evolved since the pandemic began. It wasn’t just going to offer books to students.

“This past summer, we decided to take the Book Box to a whole new level,” Camper said. “We knew Gov. DeWine had said ‘how are schools going to respond to potential learning loss?’ and we knew particularly at the elementary level that traditional summer school is really ineffective.

“The last thing we wanted to do was bring kids into a cold, air-conditioned building all summer working on a packet or on a computer-based program,” she added. “Our kids didn’t need anymore time on screens.”

The idea was then hatched to bring the Book Box to the students like they did with the lunch box, except on a grander scale.

Instead of giving out books, the SummerXP program was launched, with Camper explaining XP meant either the summer experience or experience points that are earned and often needed to level up in video games.

Every day in the summer, the Book Box Truck would be set up at a particular spot for 90 minutes, setting up a book station, a game station, and another station for a community partner or other activity.

Some of those community partners and special guests included the Cleveland Browns mascot Chomps, Morley Library, Holden Arboretum, Jungle Terry, the YMCA and local musician Chuck Fink.

“Kids would go through a series of stations and the Lunch Box would come to provide lunch, and then they could earn points and earn daily prizes for attendance and completion of any take home activities,” Camper said. “We did that for about nine weeks.”

At the end of the summer, other prizes including gift cards, t-shirts and board games were given away as another reward to celebrate what the students had accomplished over the year.

“We’re very blessed to get a ton of donations from community organizations, and just from people who want to help our schools,” Camper said. “Our books are all donated and now we get new books.”

According to Camper, a big part of the focus became the social and emotional aspect, with the academic aspect becoming almost secondary, as nearly 60% of families kept their children home from the start of the pandemic to the end of last school year.

“We knew we needed to get kids comfortable to get outside in the summer with the number for COVID being maybe a little lower,” Camper said.

Looking forward, a lot of feedback came in, especially with a few teachers who became regular coordinators for the Book Box Truck. One piece of feedback was moving activity away from the high school since lower attendance was tracked there, as older siblings would often bring their younger siblings out to the truck away from Harvey High School.

“We have a few ideas which we haven’t finalized yet, including hosting some days inside at the elementaries to shelter kids from the weather and bugs, especially bees. But we know we want to do the same model, but being able to have a more permanent set up if we can make that work.”