Summer school planning underway

The Shawano School District’s summer school program will be a lot easier for families this year as officials plan to keep the pandemic in the rear-view mirror and have a program similar to what was available in 2019.

There will be virtual options for families who are not ready for their children to be back inside the buildings, according to Rod Watson, summer school coordinator, but the district is planning in-person learning from Monday through Thursday for five weeks in June and July, as well as Friday field trips to Shawano Lake.

“If you remember, we had that planned last year, but the pandemic ruined everything, and we went virtual for the traditional session and an in-person outdoor session at the end of July and early August that was pretty well attended but didn’t involve that many students,” Watson said.

For most students, there will be four classes a day, many of them enrichment-based, according to Watson. Some new classes include Spanish for first and second grades, a literature lovers class, engineering classes and even coding classes.

“There are roughly 100 different classes that students can choose from,” Watson said. “They are shuffled every year as teachers come and go for a specialty, so we might not be able to teach that anymore, but we offer other ones that teachers want to teach.”

Some remediation takes place for students who need it, usually in reading, writing and math, Watson said.

The district is also planning a shorter, second summer session for the first three weeks in August, according to Watson. Students would take two classes per day in this session, he said, and some of the classes would help students to transition to a new grade or a new school, such as the freshman academy for students preparing to start high school.

“There’s a class called Camp Third Grade, which I’m working on with teachers at Hillcrest (Primary School) and teachers at Olga Brener (Intermediate School) about what skills they’d like all third-graders to have,” Watson said. “There’s also a Camp Sixth Grade for when they come over here (to Shawano Community Middle School).”

Other classes in that August session will also address social and emotional learning, according to Watson. That includes classes on structured play outside.

There has not been an interest in the virtual sessions as of April 6, when Watson presented the summer school plans to the Shawano School Board, but he anticipated some families will want to keep the learning going during the summer months but don’t want to have their children in the building while the pandemic is still ongoing.

“There’s all kinds of ways we can do it,” Watson said. “We’ve just got to see what kind of interest there is.”

Almost 120 students have already signed up for summer school, with some of the students not from within the Shawano School District boundaries, and Watson is estimating there could be 1,000 students involved with classes by the time all is said and done.

“I’ve been doing this for seven years, and we usually have 500 or 600 who sign up traditionally, and the rest sign up later,” Watson said. “It’s sometimes hard for people to plan ahead.”

Staffing could be a challenge, with interest from existing staff being lower, which Watson attributed to the topsy-turvy school year caused by the coronavirus pandemic. He noted that his current vacancies are in specialty classes, not the traditional ones.

“So far, student numbers are down, but it’s hard to predict since we only opened things up a week ago,” he said. “It’s hard to determine how many students will want to do summer school.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com