Students keep learning through summer months

By 10:35 a.m. on August 1, it had to be 85 degrees inside the classrooms in the north wing of Greece Olympia High School, one of the sites for BOCES 2’s Regional Summer School. But Joel Cotton, a soon-to-be senior from Chuchville-Chili, was determined not to let the heat deter him from his goal. Joel was in summer school to complete his junior-year English course satisfactorily, a challenge that involved raising both his class average and his final score on the tough New York State Comprehensive English Regents Exam.

"I’m motivated to do better this time," Joel said. "I know I can do it if I just really work at it. I didn’t pay enough attention to this stuff in regular school, but I learned a lesson about that."

Joel joined literally thousands of other students in area elementary, middle and senior high school summer programs. Some were there because they needed to complete work from the regular school year or improve their grades or exam scores, but many others came to get ahead in required coursework so they could take more electives during the school year. Some, particularly those in Kendall and Hilton’s elementary programs, came just to keep busy and stay academically sharp. Area summer school administrators agree, summer school provides invaluable help to struggling students while also enabling others to extend their learning.

"We specifically invited some students to our Summer Program," said Scott Wright, principal at Kendall Elementary School, which received a two-year grant to provide a summer school for students requiring academic assistance. "There were kids that we knew needed the extra help. But after we got those kids signed up, we opened the program up to any who wanted to attend." Kendall’s program, which met every morning for four weeks, served 70 students ranging in grade level from those going into fourth through those exiting eighth. More than half were there simply because they wanted to be, Wright said.

In much the same way, Hilton offered a four-week Elementary Summer Learning Program for students in kindergarten through sixth grade, said Rob Berg, principal of that district’s summer session. "We encourage certain students to attend," he said, "but I know we had quite a few kids there who simply love school and wanted to come. Coming in the summer keeps students fresh; it helps maintain their skill base. The classes are small and kids really get to develop a relationship with their teacher. Sometimes the kids and parents request a teacher they had in the past that they really liked – then they can reconnect – or perhaps they ask for the teacher the child is about to have. This way that child gets a little head start with the teacher."

More than 2,400 area seventh through twelfth-graders from the Churchville-Chili, Wheatland-Chili, Spencerport, Hilton, Brockport, Greece, Kendall, and Holley districts attended the BOCES 2 Regional Summer School program this year. The six-week program was in two sites; about 500 students attended the program at Brockport High School and the rest at Greece Olympia. Students could take full courses, sign up for six-day review courses to prepare to retake Regents exams, or simply come for the tests, which were given in mid-August. Gates-Chili runs a similar, but independent, program.

The districts that participate in the Regional Summer School through BOCES, which just finished its fourth year, save money by working together to share the expenses of teachers and other staff, administrators, and supplies. Teachers are hired from the participating districts, the schools take turns providing the space, and each site has it own principal.

Hiring the right teachers, finding the right spaces for them to teach in, and getting more than 2,000 students registered for the right courses and exams in the months of May and June is no small feat, but the BOCES 2 Regional Summer School principals, with support from BOCES staff and administrators, got the job done.

"This is just a glimpse of the enormous responsibility that full-time principals handle regularly," said Rob Banzer, the principal at the Brockport Regional Summer School site, who is an assistant principal at Brockport during the school year. "My work in just a few weeks this summer gave me a genuine appreciation of the full-time hard work of the people who run our schools."

The summer program administrators credit their teachers and support staff with the success of their programs. "It certainly shows how committed some teachers are to improving students achievement that they will return to work with them in the summer," Berg noted.

Teaching in a summer program has a unique set of dilemmas, said Rob Privitere-Coats, a history teacher from Churchville-Chili who worked at the Greece Olympia Regional Summer School site this summer. He taught twelve students from three different districts for three hours each day - fewer kids, but a much longer chunk of time than he usually gets. And the students’ needs were very diverse -- a few of the students were taking the course for the first time to get it out of the way so they could take more advanced courses this fall. Others were taking the course because they’d failed something else earlier and didn’t have time for it in their schedules if they wanted to graduate on time. Privitere-Coats had a little more than five weeks, three hours a day, to teach them what they needed to know about all of United States history.

"The task is to keep things moving along for three hours a day, keeping them motivated and learning while not moving so fast that some kids get lost," Privitere-Coats said. "And you can’t get too caught up in too many details. Sometimes you have to practice a little ‘creative deletion.’" On the other hand, Privitere-Coats was known to encourage his students to bring in the occasional lawn chair for an outdoor study session. After all, he said, it is summer.

Lawn chairs aside, while the Regional Summer School looked a lot like regular school in a hot building, the elementary school programs were a little sneaky about designing activities that looked like play, but were really work.

"We were avoiding that ‘school feeling,’" said Wright, noting that Kendall’s summer program coordinator, Kim Gitzen, planned trips for the students and teachers to Brown’s Berry Patch and the Planetarium. "The teachers knew that the scavenger hunt at Brown’s Berry Patch involved some reading, writing, and math, but I’m not sure the students caught on to that!"

Students at Hilton’s program spent time at the "outdoor classroom," a creek within walking distance of the school, the library, and visiting local businesses, said Berg. "We tapped into community resources as much as we could," he added.

In Joel Cotton’s high school English classroom, there were no field trips, just lots of reading and writing. However, his dedication, persistence, and even his sweat paid off. When he took the Regents Exam in English for the second time, he raised his score nearly 20 points, from the "D" range to the "B" range. That’s a summer for him to be proud of.