The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 03/22/2021. After the Safe and Resilient Return Report was presented and the Studer Pulse Survey results were reviewed, Assistant Superintendent Steve Harrison reported on the district’s ongoing progress monitoring efforts and plans for Summer School.
Steve reviewed with the Board that one of the things that arose from reporting previous academic data was a desire to centralize and systematize components of progress monitoring so that the three high schools could come together regularly and talk about how credit recovery efforts are going, what they are seeing with student support efforts, and provide opportunities for each site to learn from one another. They also wanted to ensure as they respond to the data that they aren’t creating future problems with the solutions they put in place today. Administrators at the secondary level are meeting with all three high schools every other week at a minimum specifically for progress monitoring.
As of March 18, 646 credits have been recovered. These are credits that were previously not earned during the semester. [They had a very high number of incompletes for the first semester which is, presumably, where these credits are being recovered from.]
They have created a new position called a Graduation Coach. This is designed for high school students, and specifically targets seniors given that they have the least amount of time to get back on track to graduate. A Graduation Coach connects with approximately 5 students and, outside of their current contract time, serves in a liaison role between the classroom teachers and the students who are working to recover credits. They work directly with students so they can complete the graduation requirements by the end of the school year.
They do not have one coach per building but have multiple coaches available. The district is using ESSER II dollars to pay for those Graduation Coaches. As an example, if a student has 3 different courses from the first semester that they need to recover a credit for, the Graduation Coach can help them set up a plan–to potentially tackle each course one by one, or perhaps to navigate all three at the same time.
He then moved on to what the 2021 summer school options will be.
Last summer, summer school was 100% virtual. This year they want to reconnect with students primarily in person.
They will ensure that mitigation safety protocols are still in place for summer school. They’ve connected with staff members from career and technical education, physical education, fine arts, and STEM and will be providing courses from all those areas. They want to provide multiple options throughout the summer and do not want to take a cookie cutter approach because they know they will continue to have students with diverse needs. They want to create a multi-level system of support so that if one summer school option doesn’t work for a student they will still have other opportunities. They also want to ensure that their efforts in the current 2nd semester can also continue into summer so that the door does not close June 4. [It comes across as if they really don’t want to have to finalize grades and are pushing out the moment when they have to give out final grades as far as they possibly can. That would not be surprising given the very high failure and incomplete rate they are currently facing.
They are offering 3 different summer school options.
Summer School Option 1: In-person Instruction Available For Students Who Need To Recover Credit (June 14th-July 2nd)
They want to make sure that students have multiple opportunities for credit recovery even during the same day. 1st semester credit recovery options will be available in the morning and 2nd semester credit recovery options will be available in the afternoon
Although most of the courses offered are for credit recovery, they will also be offering Marketing and Summer Shakespeare as opportunities to actually earn credit.
Ceramics and Art Survey are listed as credit recovery options and that is because there was a significant number of students who failed an elective course during the first semester. They wanted to provide options outside of core content areas because they do have a fine arts credit requirement for graduation.
Summer School Option 2: ESSER II Supported Options
This option is an effort to make sure that they have as seamless a transition from current efforts taking place now into the summer. This is aimed at students working with a Graduation Coach or anyone trying to complete 1st semester credits. This option will allow students to work beyond the last day of school and do course work that would still apply to a grade from a previous semester for which they had received an incomplete.
They realize normal school day hours may not work for all students so they wanted to provide a flexible option to allow students to work at their own schedule. This option does not lock students into either in-person or virtual but offers multiple opportunities.
The ESSER II funding will allow teachers to be compensated as they work with students into the summer.
The deadline for students to complete their work under this option is June 30, but if they do not meet that deadline they can either utilize Option 1 or Option 3.
Summer School Option 3: Students Who Need To Recover Credit, In-Person And/Or Hybrid Instruction Will Be Available Throughout The Summer Through Edgenuity e2020 Alternative Courses
Students will be able to use Edgenuity e2020 courses or they can access their courses from the previous year in Canvas so they can finish that work up.
Beyond that, they realized that summer school is not just about academics but also serves a social/emotional function. Student Services staff members will have built in summer school time for a social worker or counselor to make home contact if they haven’t heard from a student recently or by providing other unlisted social/emotional services.
They have opportunities to learn from what has happened over the last year. How can that new knowledge be applied to improving AASD’s systems in the future?
They want to align their school year expectations with summer school practices. They have traditionally had very strict attendance protocols and expectations for summer school. They want to change that so that if there’s an attendance issue, just like during the regular school year, they don’t shut the student out of the rest of the school year. They still need to maintain a threshold of standards in terms of what is needed to be successful but also make sure that, rather than focusing exclusively on consequences, they are providing social/emotional support and focusing their efforts to help students change those behaviors. They want to help students get to the finish line.
They will potentially have more staff available. They have hired an additional High School Coordinator who will be supporting their work to connect with students and families and assure that summer school is as successful as possible.
They will also have summer school options for 5k-9th grade students.
All students currently in 5k-8 will have i-Ready modules available to them throughout the summer, but this will only be available for students who have already previously utilized/engaged with i-Ready modules. That would be anyone who was part of the fall, winter, or spring assessment and utilized the accompanying online tools.
Last summer i-Ready was the main source of summer school learning, but, because this coming summer will be in-person, the i-Ready services will not have new content being pushed out.
They’ve done a lot of work planning for upcoming summer school and have been looking at what they can do differently in certain areas. Where are areas where they could be more responsive and possibly more flexible? How are they keeping their focus as much as possible on in-person learning given that students haven’t had that for much of the school year.
After the presentation ended, they opened the floor for questions.
Board member Barry O’Connor really appreciated what they’re doing in regard to interventions with students. He thought the piece that’s missing is the motivation for kids to participate. They’re assuming that kids will want to finish their classes, but those who work with kids know that it’s always been a challenge to figure out how to attract the kids who need to utilize summer school. He thought the statistic was that about 30% of the kids who could benefit from summer school actually utilize it. He liked the idea ofl non-hard core attendence. Strict attendance rules cause too many kids to back out.
Steve agreed. There are areas where they need to make sure they’re holding a standard for, but is that the end all be all? What is their purpose behind summer support? It’s to help fill in gaps as much as possible, and, at the high school level, to recover credits. He wished he had the perfect carrot to get kids engaged with summer school. He saw them having an opportunity with Graduation Coaches and many teachers connecting with students during student support time. If students experience success now in recovering credits, hopefully they will also see that that success doesn’t have to stop at the end of the year but they can continue to earn credits over the summer.
Barry wanted to know if the Graduation Coaches were only going to work with seniors or would they be working with 9th and 10th graders also.
Per Steve, they prioritized Seniors, recognizing those are the students who have the least amount of time left. But they know they need to shift gears to other grade levels as well.
Jim Bowman said that maybe the Board needs to make a statement to the parents of the community. He thought students and parents should use different criteria for the summer to select different courses than they have in the past. There was a tendency in the past to take a fun class fun in the summer. He thought that needs to change. Because of the pandemic a lot of kids are going to come up short. Parents need to think about the future when they walk off the graduation stage as a Senior. Maybe the Board could help by making a statement to the community about thinking about what their children need for the future when they select summer courses this year. [I’m pretty sure that statement did not go over well with the group of parents who have been advocating for a return to school.]
Steve said that was a good point. That is why it’s important to connect with the counselor. Students need to not only get enough credits but get them from the correct mix of courses. They need to be strategic so they’re not only getting the correct number of credits but have them in the right areas.
Barry suggested that they could offer donuts for breakfast every morning for the high schools kids who show up. He then stated that that was a joke, then added “But it might work.”
Board member Kris Sauter expressed appreciation for all the effort that has gone into creating a really innovative and flexible summer program that really seems to focus on many different individual needs.
She wanted to make sure she understood accurately….would a Graduation Coach possibly work through the summer individually with a couple students on some of these credit issues?
Steve said that was a possibility. They want to see situations where a student has a good relationship with the Graduation Coach and is definitely making strides to complete their credita, ideally before the end of June. If they don’t have that relationship support AASD could potentially lose students along the way. It’s going to take a lot of different types of support in order to make this work, and it’s not just the academic piece. That’s why it’s important to have the Student Services Team be a part of summer school planning.
Kris said that a student might identify particular staff members with whom they have a good relationship and that might determine which connections needed to support the student. In terms of motivation factor, if a student does have a connection with an adult, that will often make a difference in their interest in a particular class. She waa concerned about the number of adults who would be needed in order to make this program successful and wondered if that was a concern of Steve’s as well.
Steve said staffing is always an issue. Summer school is not always completely district staffed either. Sometimes they’ll have staff members come in from other districts. He said plainly that summer school staffing continues to be a challenge now as in the past. That will affect what they can offer and they may have to look at other flexible, non-in-person ways that will allow them to not to give up on credit recovery.
Barry mentioned all the Covid Funds they have available. If a student has a good relationship with a classroom teacher would it be possible to compensate the classroom teacher for taking the 10 students failing their course in their course under their wing over the summer so they can complete the work?
Steve said that was essentially what option 2 is. One caveat is they need to be more careful in the summer regarding documentation. It needs to be very precise so that they can use Covid money to fund it. But, Barry’s suggestion is why they have ESSER II dollars. He added that, more than anything, the circumstances are forcing all of them to be more creative.
Thus ended the summer school update.
You can view the video of the full meeting here: https://youtu.be/BrDF0koYUg8
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