Summer is off to a brilliant start for hundreds of emerging readers as the 2025 STARS (Students and Teachers Achieving Reading Success) Summer Reading Program gets underway across Alpine School District. This year, the celebrated program is providing crucial, targeted literacy instruction to 675 students in 36 classrooms, ensuring summer is a time for academic leaps, not learning loss.

students incorporate play into developing reading skills in a small group during the Summer STARS program

For more than two decades, STARS has been changing lives through its research-backed approach. The program, funded entirely by the Alpine School District Foundation, targets students at risk of falling behind. Its success lies in its concentrated model: for 20 days, from June 2nd to the 27th, students engage in a three-hour daily block of small-group instruction with expert reading interventionists. This intensive focus yields dramatic results, with a significant percentage of students each summer maintaining or moving to the Acadience Benchmark for reading.

This year, the program is introducing an exciting partnership with the district’s Science Team. The collaboration is built on the principle that “Literacy is a domain in search of content; Science is a domain in need of communication.” The integrated curriculum will use engaging science topics to help students develop critical oral language, vocabulary, sentence-level comprehension, and writing skills.

The STARS program runs daily from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at 18 school sites throughout the district.

a reading interventionist works 1:1 with a summer STARS student

The Stars Come out in Summer