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Many may find summer school days numbered
By ROBERT KING
© St. Petersburg Times, BROOKSVILLE -- Summer school, long criticized as a cushy fallback for students who goof off during the regular year, is about to fade farther out of existence. The School Board agreed Tuesday to eliminate summer school for everyone except high school juniors and seniors -- and even then only at the discretion of principals. Board members plan to make their decision official with a vote at their Oct. 2 meeting. Instead of summer classes, educators are beefing up remedial programs offered between August and May. Their thinking: Students who truly struggle must not be left to founder until summer, and slackers will work harder if they don't have summer school to fall back on. Summer school has been on shaky ground since December, when school officials weren't sure they had money to pay for the 2001 session. Eventually, there was enough money for a shrunken version: summer school for only grades 8-12. But the mere threat of eliminating summer school seemed only to prove the point of summer school's failure: Principals said kids immediately began trying harder when they thought their safety net might be cut. That started a discussion that led board members and principals to conclude that summer school has been costing more than it's worth. Now, what once was a fixture of summer is on the verge of extinction. Taking summer school's place is a hodgepodge of daytime, after-school, nightly and Saturday programs that promise to do what once might have been put off for months. Not only does an immediate response make academic sense, it makes FCAT sense. The all-important Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is the basis for the state's school accountability system, is given in March. If schools wait until summer to remediate, their students will go into the exam unprepared. For schools, which get cash rewards for good test scores and can lose students to private schools because of perennially bad scores, that's risky business. Under that reality, schools have been gradually ratcheting up their mid-year remediation programs. Starting in August, students who are behind get pulled out of physical education and other elective classes to brush up on their reading or math. Teachers are staying after school to tutor kids weak in the fundamentals. In some schools, study halls have returned. There are remedial classes on weekdays and even on Saturdays. In fact, the decline of summer school won't mean that much of a switch this year. Schools have already been moving in that direction. Remediation -- the art of bringing struggling students up to speed -- cost the county's schools $4.7-million last year. This year, it's likely to cost $5-million. The cash spent on summer school -- $632,000 in 2000, more than $500,000 this year -- will simply be shifted to the remediation programs that happen during the year, said Charles Casciotta, who oversees middle and high school curriculum. Assistant Superintendent Barney Stratton said it's possible that all summer work will be eliminated. But it is more likely that schools will use summers to help high school seniors patch together the few requirements they need to graduate and to help juniors get in the position to graduation the next year. They will do that not with summer classes, but with summer academic prescriptions: specific tasks that students can take home and complete to boost themselves up to a passing grade that will earn a vital missing credit. In the end, principals say they expect failure rates to drop and graduation rates to improve. "We believe that, by emphasizing that students need to stay current with their work for classes and studying, that students will make more of an effort and improve their grades," said Hernando High principal Elaine Sullivan.
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