Government offers optional extension of school programs following wartime disruptions

The government will spend NIS 1.1 billion ($377 million) on expanded summer education programs for students from kindergarten through ninth grade to help them recover from wartime learning disruptions, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Education Minister Yoav Kisch announce in a joint statement.

The school year typically concludes at the end of June.

Kisch says the optional program is intended to help students make up for learning gaps caused by, among other things, five weeks of closures during the war with Iran that covered the Passover break, while also providing “emotional support and innovative artificial intelligence programs.”

First announced in April, the initiative was then estimated to cost approximately NIS 750 million ($242 million), pending final budget agreements between the Education and Finance ministries.

Smotrich says that the program will “allow parents to return to work after a difficult year,” and that the program will include an AI-based learning pilot.

The initiative includes extending state-subsidized summer programming for students in kindergarten to third grade for three additional weeks and expanding it to include students through sixth grade, as well as a summer academic catch-up program for middle-school students.

The subsidized elementary-school program, which functions much like a day camp, typically runs for about three weeks for kindergarten through third-grade students, but will now operate for twice as long and include older elementary grades.

The new middle-school program, by contrast, is designed as an academic catch-up framework to help students make up for lost learning time, and will focus on “AI literacy, math, science and English” as well as STEM.