Sweating It Out : Despite Lure of Outdoors, Summer School Enrollment Grows

In Ventura, hundreds of high school students are spending their summer in classrooms within easy dreaming distance of the beach.

To some, the distractions are overwhelming.

“It’s not my idea of a great way to spend the summer,” said Cindy Herrera, 15, who was at Ventura High on Thursday to brush up on her math skills.

To others, summer school is tolerable.

“It doesn’t really get sunny until after we get out of school, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much,” said after-school surfer Jarred Poehler, 16.

Across Ventura County, growing numbers of students are siding with Jarred, as summer school enrollments swell with youngsters seeking to make up failed classes or move ahead in their schoolwork.

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In Simi Valley, where summer school began Thursday, Principal Dennis Rast said the increase in students there may be the result of a new summer schedule, which allows students a 1 1/2-week break between the end of the regular school year and the beginning of summer school.

“It offers people a chance to go on vacation,” Rast said.

Ventura officials tie the upsurge in summer school enrollment to an increase in year-round enrollment.

In Oxnard, the increase may be linked to new, stricter high school graduation requirements that make it more important for students to make up failed classes.

In Thousand Oaks, more students may be attending because the summer school moved from Newbury Park High to a more centrally located--and centrally air-conditioned--campus at Thousand Oaks High School.

Whatever the reasons, the results are clear. Countywide this summer, there are hundreds more students struggling to learn despite the summertime distractions.

Some summer schools boast new programs. In Thousand Oaks, special-education students are now housed on the same campus as the other students. Moorpark schools are offering health and physical education summer classes for the first time.

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For teachers, though, the basic challenge is the same--keeping students’ attention during the summer, when, as Simi Valley Principal Rast acknowledges, “their friends may be out doing other things.”

Compounding the problem are summer school schedules. While classes let out early in the day, some of them last four hours at a time.

That’s a long time for students with MTV attention spans, said Sande Washburn, a Thousand Oaks summer school teacher. It is even a challenge for high school teachers, who are used to teaching for only an hour at a time, she said.

Washburn breaks up lengthy classroom stretches by mixing in arts and crafts projects and student contests. In her health class on Thursday afternoon, students were competing to coin slogans promoting cardiovascular health. Among the entries: “If you keep your life on track, you won’t have a heart attack” and “Each smoke can lead to a stroke.”

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In the Pleasant Valley School District, Camarillo elementary school teachers trying to hold students’ attention offer a curriculum in which classes emulate travel agencies to learn math and geography.

In Oxnard, it seems easier to get students to behave and pay attention during the summer than during the year, said Mike Hernandez, who supervises 4,347 summer school students on five campuses for the Oxnard Union High School District.

“Kids that come to summer school come because they want to come,” Hernandez said. “They are pretty much focused.” The Oxnard high school students may be resigned to summertime classes thanks to previous experience. The elementary school district there, with a year-round schedule, makes some summer school classes mandatory for all its students.

Stoll is a Times staff writer and Saillant is a Times correspondent.