Summer School Students ‘Build a Better World’
By Jacob Mathias
Hundreds of students have just a few weeks left in the district’s summer school program.
No longer the remedial or catch-up program of the past, summer school of the past, summer school at Jefferson Elementary School is open to all students in grades 4K through fourth. Just under 200 students attend the school this summer alone.
Students attend school for half the day, where they continue learning in all subjects with a creative twist.
“Let’s focus on some academics, but let’s make summer school fun too,” said Alfred Pieper, principal for the summer school program. “With three hours of summer school you probably have about an hour and a half of academics.”
Each summer school has a theme and Jefferson’s is “Build a Better World.” The summer school teachers use this theme to design lessons in reading, science and math.
Rachel Roelse, a first grade teacher at Jefferson, has taught summer school for five years. Her lessons are themed around students being community helpers and good citizens while exploring what they want to be when they grow up.
She uses the themes to inform her different reading and math lessons.
“It’s kind of a relaxing environment for the kids to maintain some of their structure but still explore more of their creative side as well,” said Roelse.
Summer school programs are also housed at McKinley, Madison and Kennedy schools. The overall enrollment in summer school programs has been increasing as Kennedy is only in it’s second year.
“It’s really neat to see the young kids and their motivation and their energy and their interest in all these things,” said Pieper. “These kids just love to be in school. That changes when they get older.”
Pieper said summer school provides many benefits to the students — not only is there a social benefit to the students being together, but core subject areas like reading and math are benefited by continued learning and the summer learning backslide is curbed.
“[Parents] like to see their kids continue on with some learning,” said Pieper. “That’s what the hope is for a lot of people: to keep kids going and thinking about schools and academics.”
Another program at the school has students reading “around the world”. Students are encouraged to log the amount of time they read each day and each minute counts as one mile. Once the minutes and miles are totaled, the students track how far around the world they’ve read.
Pieper said the students’ summer goal was to read a cumulative 25,000 miles, the distance around the earth.
“We’ve already exceeded 25,000 miles and we’re working on our next trip around the world,” he said.
Any student under the age of 18 is also eligible for free breakfast and lunch through the summer schools, giving students adequate nutrition they may not receive otherwise.
Summer school programs end July 27.