Nov. 27--School District 116 officials are looking at changing up elementary summer school programs they say aren't doing enough to boost students' scores.
"We would hope that more of those students would meet expected growth," said Sarah Swanson, coordinator of teaching and learning at the Round Lake-area district.
At the elementary and middle school levels, students are selected for the four-week summer school program based on test scores and teacher recommendations, with students whose scores put them in the bottom 10 percent of their class getting the first shot at enrollment, Swanson said.
During a round of testing this fall, 10 percent of summer school students scored at grade level in math, with 12 percent meeting that benchmark in reading, compared to 53 percent and 60 percent of students who didn't attend summer school, according to a report presented to the school board earlier this month.
Swanson said administrators expected to see a gap between the percentages of students testing at grade level, since only students who were struggling to keep up were given the summer school option. But the kids who got four weeks of summer school also made no more progress than those who didn't, with 66 percent and 67 percent of summer students scoring well enough to meet targets for improvement in math and reading, respectively, compared to 68 percent of students who didn't attend summer school in both subjects.
"We'd expect to see the percent meeting expected growth for kids that went into the program be higher," said Donn Mendoza, assistant superintendent of secondary education. "Because that's not what we're seeing, we're going to take a look at the manner in which it's implemented because it's fairly clear that when you look at the cost-benefit, the way we're doing it is maybe not yielding the outcome we want."
Each five-hour elementary summer school day includes whole-class and small-group instruction in literacy and math, along with a half-hour of computer lab time, Swanson said. The format hasn't changed over the past few years, but they have expanded it to all schools, she said.
Swanson and Mendoza said the district hasn't yet made formal plans for strengthening summer school. School officials typically make recommendations for summer school programming when the district begins preparing a budget for the next year, Mendoza said.
Summer school at the high school level has already seen changes in the past few years, Mendoza said. Outside of a summer program giving 75 incoming freshmen enrolled in honors courses a head start on more advanced work, high school summer school students are typically recovering credit for courses they previously failed or didn't finish, he said.
The courses are run through an online program, facilitated by a teacher. This year, students had fewer weeks to finish the courses but more hours each day to do so, and they could set their own schedule to fit around summer jobs or other activities, Mendoza said.
The district hired an additional teacher to work with credit-recovery students during the school year, so fewer students needed to retake courses over the summer, Mendoza said. Students completed 397 credit-recovery courses this past summer, down from 522 the year before.
But the district also saw a 16 percent drop in the percentage of students who passed summer school courses, down from about 91 percent in the 2013-2014 school year, according to the summer school report.
Mendoza said the decline has less to do with the changes in the program's format than the pool of students attending.
"The typical student in summer school this year is a little different than in the past," he said. "In some cases, they didn't take advantage of opportunities to retake courses during the year, or they may not have gotten it during the year and were on their third try."
Combine summer school students with those recovering credits during the year, and the pass rate increased, Mendoza said.
Online courses let the district offer more opportunities for students to take a wider range of classes than they could if they had to supply a teacher for each course, he said.
"There's no way an online credit-recovery class replicates the experience they'd get with a teacher in front of them, but that's why we don't let them do it the first time online," he said. "We feel good about the way it serves a purpose here."
lzumbach@tribpub.com
