It is hard to believe that summer is almost over. Like most districts in California, ours has been under intense fiscal pressure due to ongoing budget cuts. This influence, coupled with increasing expectations for student achievement, led us to redesign our summer school options. We now have an opportunity to reflect and evaluate the merits of our decisions.
The silver lining in the current financial crisis has been the relaxation of rules for programs like summer school. In the past, our revenue would have been linked to the number of hours of attendance for students that qualified for varying rates of reimbursement. Now that the supplemental hourly programs such as summer school are flexible, we asked ourselves what the needs of our students were and how we could best use existing resources to address those areas. As a result, we decided to offer a distance learning program for students in need of credit recovery at the high school level and an English Learner academy for all grades. Thanks to recent funding from the Education Technology K-12 Voucher Program, we had some iPads and iPod touch devices that we decided to deploy as part of our EL academy.
How did it work?
Our district sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean about 35 miles north of San Diego. I mention this because the first thing we noticed was that attendance, which usually drops off during the summer, held steady in spite of the lure of our coastal diversions. Student engagement, which typically is not at its peak during summer interventions, was remarkably different than in the past. Teacher enthusiasm—also subject to variation during the summer—was off the charts in a positive direction. Grades and local assessments also showed higher levels of success than we previously have seen in the summer.
Here are a few recommendations based on this experience:
- Take advantage of the existing options to be creative with program design.
- As always, consider multiple funding streams to support your plans. We used Voucher funding for the hardware, Title III dollars for the EL academy instruction, and some Tier III revenues to provide for distance learning resources. Much of the planning was supported by a one-time, ARRA Technology grant.
- Remember that many technology resources—hardware and software—are unused during summer. For us, having the iPads sit in storage would not have served our students. The distance learning licenses we purchased earlier in the year were “annual” subscriptions that also were viable for use in the summer without any additional expenses.
- Use student achievement data to guide your areas in need of attention.
- Empower teachers and staff to best use the technology resources. Our teachers discovered new and creative ways to motivate and instruct students that we would not have been able to anticipate had we provided too much of a script for their plans.
As educational leaders, my hope is that we find ways to turn our challenges into opportunities for improvement. Strategic and novel deployment of existing technology resources is one strategy that will help us to best serve our students and communities. If we can make it work during the summer, what is to stop us from doing the same throughout the year?
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