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by Adelheide Johansen
This year’s summer school at NS differs a great deal from last year. A few changes have been made for a new and improved experience for students.
“The only thing that we have had as far as summer school goes has been credit recovery,” said principal Christine Straatman, “but this year we were given a federal grant and were able to expand our summer school program.”
Last year consisted of only credit recovery through online classes, but with the grant the school has received, they have added in-person class options as well. Some of the in-person courses that they are offering include general art, overcoming the odds, art and literature, computer coding, ESL, financial literacy, math, and creative writing workshop. It is free to anyone who is interested or who needs to come.
“I liked them because I could always do more work than I needed to for that day to get ahead a little bit and have more days off,” said sophomore Ava Lamb.
Along with the in-person classes this year come a few field trips.
“There is a proposed trip out to Topaz–it will be a super great experience, so I’m excited,” said English teacher Kate Carney. “There is also a planned trip to an art museum up north as part of the art class.”
With all that has been going on over the last two years, the school has not been able to provide very many field trips, especially for summer school. So the teachers are excited to take some fun trips over the summer. One of them being a trip to Lagoon to celebrate the end of the summer semester.
“Classes start on June 7 and go through July 16,” Carney said. “If you complete your credits, you go to Lagoon on the 19th of July.”
After completing 2 to 3 credits over the summer school, students will be rewarded with the celebratory Lagoon trip for free.
“We will take care of the expense,” Straatman said. “[We will] bring the bus as well as sack lunches, and just have a good time at Lagoon, so we want kids to participate,”
It is looking like more students are participating in summer school this year, with an expectancy of about 80 students a grade based on the survey. One main reason for this being that many barriers have been lifted.
“The grant is helping us with the cost of running summer school, ‘’ Straatman said. “So we don’t want money to be a barrier for kids, we want kids to come in and earn credit. We have kids that are behind and we just don’t want it to be a financial burden.”
With the grant that the school has received, they were able to lift the cost for summer school classes this year, both in-person and online.
Another barrier lifted has been transportation. Last year, the school was not able to provide transportation, but this year, a change has been made to provide buses to those who need it.
“I think that the summer program will go well just because I know that kids want to graduate and there are more rewards for this summer,” Lamb said.
From her past experience with online classes, she thinks this is a great opportunity and that it will go well this summer.
“We’ve had a lot of kids who struggled this year and this is a great opportunity, so I would recommend taking summer school,” Straatman said. “Again, it’s not going to cost anything; we are going to provide transportation, there’s more selection on courses, and there might be some field trips to which we haven’t been able to do.”
