Summer Students Spark to ‘Jump-Start’

After years of desultory and limited remedial offerings that failed to turn on students and teachers, new excitement is stirring in summer schools across San Diego.

The 15 sixth- and seventh-graders in Donna Somerville’s enrichment class at Memorial Junior High School have talked with a space-station designer, went behind the scenes at the zoo, used microscopes to explore the structure of cells, and written dialogue for a play on Macintosh computers.

Somerville’s students are among 350 scattered throughout nine elementary and secondary schools in Southeast San Diego who are participating in a new magnet enrichment program. The program is made possible through a federal, multi-year grant awarded to the city school district.

The 33 or so first-graders assigned to Lois Jacobs’ class at Field Elementary in Clairemont for extra reading help don’t know that they’re part of a new district effort to try to make remediation--long the staple of summer school instruction--pay off better when the students return to classes this fall.

Jacobs and her aide, Kathy Tronerud, both from Fremont Elementary, are using new literature books, “magic circle” groupings of children working with other children, storyboard drawings and a host of other new curriculum offerings to “jump-start” the academic performance of these students, all of whom have been judged to be at risk of falling behind their peers even at their early age.

No longer are the several thousand elementary students who need more work in basic skills being asked to use the same textbooks and teaching style that proved lacking in getting them adequately prepared the first time.

To be sure, the innovations in the skills classes are happening largely at the elementary level.

Junior- and senior-high students needing to repeat a course to make up a failing grade still receive the same material during a concentrated four-hour, six-week period that leaves creativity and changes in teaching styles up to the individual teacher.

District educators believe that the changes already made--as well as others anticipated in the future--can only improve long-term academics.

Duane Stevens, who oversees the regular summer school program for the San Diego Unified School District, says that making summer school “fun” will increase learning.

The element of fun is central to the enrichment classes, which are being offered for the first time in almost a decade. Until this summer, parents interested in having their children receive such instruction had only the private Gateways program in University City as an option.

Program coordinator Carolanne Buguey said there are 350 students, about the maximum allowed under the funding, about equally divided between elementary and secondary levels. Any student at a magnet city school--a school with special curriculum designed to promote integration by attracting students from outside the immediate neighborhood--was eligible to apply. Most of the secondary students who are participating signed up for a course to prepare for college entrance examinations.

At Oak Park Elementary, teacher Peggy Araiza has organized her six-week program around an “animal kingdom” theme, drawing in elements of science, literature, writing and fine arts as a way to expose her 20 students to new ideas and experiences, as well as strengthening their writing, reading and math skills.

Her aide, Monica Pernell, a Serra High School senior who is part of a future-teachers program, said that the enrichment class is “a real eye opener. These kids have so much going on that they don’t have time to sit around and talk.”

Indeed, each day the students launch enthusiastically into a 10-minute chorus of poems and songs, ranging from “Little Orphan Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley, to the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln, and the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr., as soon as they finish the morning Pledge of Allegiance.

“All the students have varied interests and you have to stay on top of each individual child” to get the maximum result, Araiza said. “For some, you have to prepare them for enrichment, dangle a lot of carrots in front of them, like the chance to do calligraphy, to pick out a special book, and by doing so, boost their attitudes so that they’ll then sit down with their times (multiplication) tables and work on that as well.

“It’s very important (at this age) because many are getting ready for middle school . . . I want to have as much impact on their lives as possible, to give them as many tools for leaning as possible.”

Memorial’s Somerville had her students preparing reports on animals last week in anticipation of their visit to the zoo. Each read their report orally in front of a video camera as preparation for performing a play in front of an audience later in the course.

“I want them to bond, to have better self-esteem, to have positive peer pressure for achievement, to make this summer count so that it will make a difference in their lives,” said Somerville, a resource teacher during the regular year at Memorial, an oasis of learning in the midst of one of the toughest barrios in San Diego.

Somerville worries that some of the students could eventually succumb to the barrio pressure to not do well in school, especially as they move into the secondary years.

But for the moment, she is exhilarated about the summer class.

In general, while the enrichment classes have no more than 20 students, the regular summer classes can range from 25 students to almost 40, making the “jump start” effort of teachers even more difficult because it limits the personal attention they can give students.

But Stevens hopes that the new literature-based curriculum written especially for summer-school use and which emphasizes hands-on learning, will address more of the problem.

“We thought that if we did something different to promote fun, not fun and games, but excitement about learning, we might short-circuit some of the failure syndrome that these kids otherwise get into,” said Pat Meredith, a resource teacher who helped write some of the summer-school literature lessons.

“It’s not easy. We realize that there are skills these children need and they haven’t learned them well enough the first time.”

Jacobs would readily agree.

Considered one of the district’s stellar teachers, Jacobs sometimes feels she has moved mountains at the end of the four-hour summer instructional day.

Many of the students still struggle to read basic sentences, and their previous lack of success leads quickly into short attention spans and horseplay as Jacobs cajoles them to think about “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile,” the book they are reading together.

She has the students talk together about crocodiles, to write a word or two about their own feelings toward the animal, to play around with paper strips of sentences to try to arrange them in the order of a story.

“It’s sad because for some of these kids, learning has no meaning and school is anything but fun,” said Tronerud, Jacobs’ aide. “Some of these kids already feel they are failures, but they don’t have to be.”

To help turn around their attitudes, Jacobs cooks for the students each Friday, showing them how to use their arithmetic to measure weights and liquids in making brownies or fruit cocktails or homemade ice cream.

“I think that they are picking up some vocabulary,” Jacobs said. “The new (literature) curriculum has made a difference” compared to controlled-word reading texts traditionally used in the district.

The new curriculum, which emphasizes writing and literature discussions especially at the upper elementary grades, has made Sheila Barron’s task much easier with her fourth- and fifth-graders at Lee Elementary in Paradise Hills.

“We have a big library, we have bought a lot of new books, we are working to get kids to see reading not as a task but as a joy,” Barron said. To that end, she constantly throws out ideas and observations to the students, asking them to think about how they might change the plot, encouraging them to write a letter to one of the story’s characters, to speculate on where the next chapters of the novel might take the plot.

“I think the student seem to be more interested” than they are in the traditional textbooks, Barron said. “There actually does seem to be a lot of thinking and listening going on.”