Elementary summer school cut
Elementary school students in the Coeur d’Alene and Lakeland districts don’t have their regular summer school options this year because school officials decided the programs weren’t worth the cost.
And that has left some parents in a bind. Peggy Luchini, a parent of two Atlas Elementary School students, said she thinks the decision also is disappointing for a lot of students.
“I would have put my son in the program this year like I do every year,” Luchini said. “I’ll just be continuing his private tutoring.”
Both districts used to offer three-week sessions for struggling elementary students. Lakeland cut the program this year to save money after seeing it make limited improvements to student performance, said Ron Schmidt, the district’s assistant superintendent.
The Coeur d’Alene district took the same action, citing low attendance and lackluster results that warrant a complete reworking of the program, said Pam Pratt, the district’s director of elementary education.
“The main reason is we’re not real happy with the success of what we’ve been doing,” she said. “The attendance sometimes was down … and we just were not seeing the progress at all.”
About 225 students participated in Lakeland’s program last summer, about the same as in Coeur d’Alene.
While the middle school and high school programs remain relatively unchanged over the years, the Coeur d’Alene district’s elementary summer school program has undergone many facelifts – none of which has shown the right results, Pratt said.
“We’ve tried June, we’ve tried August, we’ve tried in between,” she said. “We just want to figure out what’s going to meet the needs of the kids and the families, because we want them to be there.”
Attendance at the high school and middle school programs tends to be better, Pratt said. At those levels, students face postponed graduation or repeating a year of classes if they don’t do their work.
“We believe that students need to learn that you’re just going to have to do it,” said Chris Hammons, principal of Lakes Middle School. “If you don’t do it in the school year, you’ll be required to do it in the summer. That’s a pretty high motivating factor to get it taken care of.”
Lakes is hosting the credit makeup program for middle school students this year. About 85 kids have until July 3 to make up the classes they failed during the school year. If they don’t, they will have to retake them in the fall.
In Coeur d’Alene, summer school is free, thanks to a property tax levy that supplements district programs not covered by state money. Post Falls also offers free credit makeup for middle school and high school students and uses federal funds for a two-week reading program for first-, second- and third-graders struggling to read.
In Lakeland, middle school and high school students pay $15 per class. The elementary school program had cost $15, too, with the remaining cost funded by the district through federal funds. A reduction in those federal funds caused the district to examine the effectiveness of the program.
“Good hard data that said a kiddo went from nonproficiency to proficiency, it just wasn’t there,” Schmidt said. “And I think that’s understandable with just three weeks.”
If the district can find more money, the program could return, because it did serve as a good way to get kids with academic problems ready to start school in the fall, he said.
Pratt plans to work on a new program this summer and consult with teachers and parents in the fall.
A variety of factors can be adjusted – the duration of classes, the location, the teachers. Ideally, regular classroom teachers would handle the summer classes instead of new ones looking for experience, Pratt said.
“They’re usually not teachers that the students are really familiar with,” she said. “I want to figure out a system that will get more of our teachers teaching.”
She encourages parents of elementary school students to take advantage of community reading programs at the city library and elsewhere in place of district summer school.
Some parents heard the district wasn’t offering the program because a new format for the Idaho Standards Achievement Test delayed results of the spring test and kept educators from knowing which students needed help, but Pratt said that isn’t the reason behind the program cut.
“We probably could figure out who should be in there,” she said. “We just did not have, again, the success that we were hoping for.”