District decides to keep a limited summer school program

A limited summer school program will be offered this year, although school district officials were uncertain that it would be available to students due to budget cuts, according to Deputy Superintendent Karst Brandsma.

District personnel are currently preparing advertisements for the programs, and are posting job positions for the summer, he said. .

Registration should be available on the web site in the next couple of weeks according to Superintendent Sherrie Brown.

Summer school programs are almost entirely dependent on grants, which makes it impossible to predict ahead of time whether or not it will be offered, Brandsma said.

“If you would have asked me [if summer school was being offered] a month ago I would have

said it’s still too early to make that determination,” he said.

State-funded programs kept, but district no longer subsidizing K-8 curriculum

State-funded remedial programs will continue to be offered at Title 1 elementary schools, where a high percentage of the students come from families who live at or below the poverty line, said Brandsma.

Sunnyland Elementary is one of four Title 1 schools in the district; the others are Alderwood, Birchwood, and Roosevelt, according to Brown.

Special education summer programs are also being kept with the help of federal funding through the American Recovery and Re-Investment Act (AARA) that was signed into law in February 2009.

$2.1 million was assigned to special education programs, according to the district's web site.

A part-time high school credit retrieval program, “The Bellingham School District Virtual Academy” will also be offered. It is expected to start after July 4 and run through the second week of August, Brandsma said.

The program provides high school students with the opportunity to earn credits to make up for failed courses.

The program is tuition-based, with a sliding scale for families of students on free/reduced lunch But, a ten-week remedial summer session previously offered to K-8 students to help them to meet standards in math and literacy will no longer be offered at non- Title 1 schools, according to Brown.

“We've just had to cut back so much because of budget cuts,” she said.

The decision to cut district subsidy of the program was part of a savings plan approved by the School Board of Directors on March 17, 2009.

“There’s certainly some advantages to summer school, but it is really outside the scope of our mission,” said Brandsma.

Cutting the program was estimated to save $200,000.

The plan was an effort to reduce the district operating budget in anticipation of the expected $2 million cut in state funding.

A further decrease in funding of around $1.6 million for 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years was implemented with the completion of the state budget on April 12, 2010.

School officials worried about consequences for students

The recent decision to keep summer school has not yet been officially announced.

According to Jeannie Havland, a counselor at Bellingham high school, staff were notified earlier this year that summer school would not be staffed this year due to the cuts.

Havland was worried about the effect of the cut on struggling students, as reducing the credit-retrieval programs for students decreases their chances of graduating in four years, she said.

According to Rebecca Pendergraft, a paraeducator at Sehome high school who was on the summer school staff in 2008, most students who will not graduate in four years choose to drop out rather than return for an additional year of school to make up for failed classes.

The current credit-retrieval program is much more limited than it used to be, she said.

In the past the program used to run for seven hours a day, which allowed students to make up most of their missing credits, according to Pendergraft.

But, beginning in 2009, the program was cut to only three hours a day, she said.

Two of the students who assist her with the special education program will not be returning to Sehome next year as they will not be graduating on time; one is planning on joining the Lynden Job Corps, and the other is going to enlist in the military, she said.

“The district has really failed [to help] those kids,” she said.

Research put out by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction also suggests that graduating on time is critical to staying in school.

Students who are held back are more likely to drop out, according to a report put out by in 2006 entitled, “Helping Students Finish School: Why Students Drop Out and How to Help Them Graduate.”

According to the report, 49.6 percent of Washington state high schoolers who dropped out before graduating did so due to “lack or progress/poor grades.”