Summer School

Some of you may have heard that I was not the most focused of students during many of
my middle and high school years. In fact, for several of those years, there was often the
looming threat of summer school that came from both my parents and my teachers. The
threat actually was a pretty good motivator for me, since I could think of nothing worse
than trudging back to Jack Jouett or AHS during the glorious days of a pre-teen and teenager
on summer break. I had friends who had to go, and the stories of misery they told
were downright frightening.

But times have changed, and summer school has changed right along with it. For the past
several years, our summer program has been less focused on remediating reading, writing
and math deficiencies and much more on developing a school experience for kids that
will be a positive one and make them excited about coming to school. We’ve done things
like focusing on Carl Hiasen’s children’s books as a driver of the curriculum, we integrated
field trips all over the county and have had guest speakers come in to talk with our
students. Our summer experience has changed from one of drudgery many decades ago,
to one that kids enjoy.

We’re hoping to take our program even further this summer, and really turn it in to an
experience that kids want to take part in. It was great to see about a dozen teachers get
together last week to brainstorm some ideas about how we can make this happen. We’ve
got a lot of planning to do, but the drive and the talent is certainly there to develop a model
program of enrichment for our kids. I’ll keep you posted on where things land, and
can’t wait to see what our staff comes up with.