Research has shown that students skills and knowledge often deteriorate during the summer months, with low-income students facing the largest losses. School districts and summer programming providers can benefit from the lessons learned by other programs in terms of developing strategies to maximize program effectiveness and quality, student participation, and strategic partnerships and funding.

The Wallace Foundation sponsored an initiative to help five cities increase collaboration, access, quality, information sharing, and sustainability in their out-of-school-time systems. The first in this three-volume series describes the cities' early work under the grant and analyzes the conditions and activities that contributed to their progress in building a coordinated system of services to meet the initiative's goals.

Initiatives to coordinate schools, cultural institutions, community-based organizations, foundations, and/or government agencies to promote access to arts education in and outside of schools have recently developed. This study looks at the collaboration efforts of six urban communities: how they started and evolved, the kinds of organizations involved, conditions that helped and that hindered coordination, and strategies used.It examines the efforts of six communities to improve arts education through coordination across multiple organizations, describing how the efforts unfolded and documenting the common and unique benefits and challenges of collaborative approaches.