The National Summer Learning Association recognizes the personalized literacy solution as key to avoiding the summer slide  

(Minneapolis, MN) March 7, 2016 — myON, a business unit of Capstone and leading provider of personalized literacy solutions for the K-12 marketplace, is proud to announce its involvement in the Champions of Change Summer Opportunity Project, a multi-agency effort led by the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) and the White House to support communities across the country in creating happy, healthy, and productive summer opportunities for America’s youth.

As part of the project, NSLA released its 2016 Action Toolkit to guide participating communities in areas such as summer reading initiatives, nutrition, and preparing America’s young people for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

The NSLA toolkit features myON as a key solution for maximizing learning and offering a unique turnkey campaign to encourage kids to read throughout the summer. The toolkit highlights myON’s valuable tools to curb the summer slide: a focus on growth, Lexile tracking ability, personalized learning experiences, a wide range of reading choices, and simply putting more books at students’ fingertips.

The toolkit was unveiled at the Champions of Change event at the White House on February 26, 2016. myON President Todd Brekhus, along with Secretary of Education John King, Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, mayors, school officials, and more than 250 noted individuals, attended the event to honor nine outstanding leaders from across the country for their efforts to transform summer from a time of high risk to a time of great reward for the country’s most vulnerable children. Brekhus shared his knowledge during a panel at the event, saying he believes that personalized reading is a way to address equity and access and measure reading’s growth.

“myON was one of the only solutions mentioned in this summer toolkit, which was a very high honor and very humbling,” said Brekhus. “We believe the summer of 2016 will be a great opportunity for myON to continue partnering with districts across the country to curb the summer slide and foster a love of reading in all children. Working in collaboration with so many notable, devoted agencies, including the White House, is an excellent opportunity for us to continue making a difference.”

Every summer, low-income youth lose two to three months in reading achievement, while their higher-income peers make slight gains. Year after year the losses accumulate, and by fifth grade the cumulative years of summer learning loss can leave low-income students almost three years behind their peers.

As part of myON’s mission to curb the summer slide, the company donated more than 5,000 books to every student in the Bay Area as part of the Super Bowl 50 celebration. myON has also been involved in large community reading initiatives with the Indiana Department of Education Hoosier Family of Readers and Hillsborough County Public Schools, which recently expanded its partnership with myON for the sixth year in a row.

About myON

myON, a business unit of Capstone, developed a personalized digital literacy platform that creates collaborative learning opportunities. myON expands the classroom for teachers and students by providing unlimited access to a collection of more than 10,000 enhanced digital books with multimedia supports, real-time assessments, and close reading tools. myON empowers students and teachers with real-time, actionable data—number and type of books opened and read, time spent reading, results of regular benchmark assessments, and more—based on embedded Lexile® assessments that measure student reading growth. With myON, every student experiences the benefits of personalized literacy instruction. For more information, please visit myON.com.