School’s Not Out for All

Summer schools across Southern California are brimming with elementary and middle schoolers who are wobbling on the edge of being held back a grade.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, a projected 10,700 second-graders and 4,500 eighth-graders who fell short of state standards and stand a chance of not being promoted are required to attend summer school. School starts July 9.

The district also has 166,000 second- through eighth-grade students who are struggling academically and were encouraged, but not required, to attend summer school.

Summer sign-ups are increasing as more school systems implement a 1998 state law aimed at ending the practice of social promotion. Such promotion involves sending students onto the next grade whether or not their work is at grade level.

The shift adds to the stress on principals, who often must search far and wide to find enough math and English teachers to fill their summer classrooms.

Los Angeles schools are focusing on second and eighth grades this year as they phase in the retention policy. Those students must show marked improvement in summer school or they will be held back. The policy will be phased in for third-grade students next year.

“I think [the policy] is really focusing everyone and putting additional emphasis on the fact that students have to reach a certain standard before they’re promoted,” said Sue Shannon, assistant superintendent of elementary instructional support services.

Of the 8,300 second-graders in the district who were required to attend summer school last year, Shannon said, “we still ended up retaining 6,400.”

But with a combination of state funding and grant money, she said, “we’ve been able to dramatically increase the amount of intervention we provide to students. Our goal is to reduce the number of students who will be retained.”

For now, many districts are scrambling to enroll at-risk children. The state law leaves it largely up to individual districts to determine how to go about eliminating social promotion. Some students in summer school already have received notice that they will be left back a grade; others know they will be promoted but that they need year-round help to catch up to grade level.

For many, being promoted depends on passing subjects this summer that overwhelmed them during the school year.

In the Whittier City School District, about one-third of the district’s nearly 7,300 students are attending summer school, most to bolster shaky reading or math skills.

The number attending summer school has leaped in the last two years, said Keni Cox, the district’s assistant superintendent of instructional services. Most of the pupils spend their mornings in classrooms without air-conditioning, eager for their noon dismissal.

The district has spent heavily to train teachers to make the best use of students’ time.

“Summer school is serious business,” Cox said. “We want not a minute of the . . . experience to be unfocused and unplanned.”

At Wilson Middle School in Glendale, the stakes are high for about 43 students who have just completed eighth grade but failed English or math. If they don’t do well in Wilson’s summer “bridge program,” they will be required to repeat an eighth-grade English or math course in high school.

The summer school program in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District is but one of a string of programs to help students throughout the year, using state funds.

“If they needed to be retained, you could not give them enough in three weeks [of summer school] to change that forecast,” said Bonnie Swann, director of elementary education for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, which has 1,057 at-risk students in summer school, about the same as last year.

“We actually call our interventions Whatever It Takes,” Swann said. “We’ve always wanted to do more for kids, but the budget was always so tight.”

Throughout Orange County, more than 21,000 children considered at risk are enrolled in summer sessions that concentrate on reading, writing and math. The numbers are likely to rise. Four of the county’s 25 affected school districts had no figures yet on students whose academic work was forcing them into the classroom this summer. Others had only partial figures.

The Garden Grove schools alone have about 9,000 students in summer classes--nearly a fifth of the district’s total enrollment--who are working below grade level and are considered at risk.

Some students resent the intrusion on their summer. Others welcome the chance to prove themselves.

“I actually love it,” said Sarah Rennaker, a Buena Park sixth-grader who is among more than 1,000 at-risk students in her school district attending summer school. “I want to learn to do more stuff to get ready for seventh grade.”

The 12-year-old was reading at a third-grade level last fall. But after spending an hour a week in a before-school reading tutorial throughout the school year, she’s brought her reading up to fifth-grade level.

“I’m very fortunate that my kids were able to attend the summer school program,” said Sarah’s mother, Robin, whose son Tyler is attending the same summer school. “If they didn’t have this extra help, it’s hard to say where they’d be. If you don’t read, you don’t go very far.”

Signed into law in 1998, the state policy banning social promotion required each school district and county board of education to approve a promotion and retention policy and to identify students who should be retained or who are at risk of being retained. The law also called for the appropriation of an initial $105 million for supplemental instruction for those students.

In the last year, the state allotted $55 million for the pupil promotion and retention program.

The law did not require districts to provide the state with promotion and retention data, however, so the state has no firm numbers on students held back or in summer school.

“Based on anecdotal information we receive, it’s clear that the districts are sending an awful lot of kids to summer school,” said Doug Stone, spokesman for the state Department of Education.

“The whole purpose [of the policy] is to have students stay on track with grade level standards before they are allowed to move on.”