Parents and school administration officials discussed a current pause to the after-school Reading Rockets learning loss program at a Mars Area School Board meeting on Tuesday night.

The program, intended to combat learning loss from the COVID-19 pandemic and help catch up students who may have fallen behind, is currently paused at the elementary level due to a lack of available staff.

Mars parent Julia Konitzky asked whether the program could potentially be continued with outside staffers.

“I had heard from multiple people, and I don’t know if there was any data collection, that the Reading Rockets was really doing a great thing for those children who were enrolled,” she said. “I would imagine a lot of them were enrolled because they did have true learning loss from COVID.”

The Reading Rockets program, along with the middle school level math and reading “Comet Club” and the high school math tutoring program, is funded by state Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding.

The program was officially paused at the elementary level last week, but the Comet Club and math tutoring programs both continue at the middle and high school.

Approximately 93 students were participating in the program at the elementary level, assistant superintendent Dr. Elizabeth McMahon said.

Mars Area superintendent Dr. Mark Gross said that the district hopes to restart the program and is actively recruiting teachers internally and externally to staff the program. Typically, participating teachers are paid per hour to teach Reading Rockets.

“We want to continue to try to actively recruit, and we will restart (the program) the second we can find enough staff to do that,” Gross said. “We’re brainstorming different ways to try and get that staffing in place so that we can launch the program again. The teachers did a phenomenal job with those kids.”