Madison Metropolitan School District
More than 6,000 students are signed up for summer school this year, according to director MacPhee Lyon (left).
The final bell has rung, and Madison’s youth are easing into summertime schedules. Pool parties, summer camp and lazy mornings replace roll call, pop quizzes and homework. But for some, summertime means summer school — and that can feel like a punishment.
Roughly 22.5 percent of Madison’s students, grades 4K through 12, will be attending summer school this year; these students are recommended by their teachers due to failing grades or poor Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment scores.
Some children also benefit from staying in school to combat a phenomenon known as summer slide — where students begin the next school year at a lower academic level than where they were before summer break.
A report by the Brookings Institute, based on a comprehensive literature review, found that students on average lost one month’s worth of school-year learning over the summer.
In an effort to make summer school feel less like penance, the Madison school district is offering expanded enrichment classes to go along with required classes in math and literacy.
“The main purpose of summer school is to catch up the students who are struggling during the school year, to make sure that they’re not falling further behind and to actually get them to push forward,” says Drew Joseph, a doctoral student in the department of curriculum and instruction at UW-Madison, who works for the district. “They’re mostly there for literacy and math instruction, but what we also want to do with the enrichment classes is push their literacy and math skills forward.”
This year, summer school students in kindergarten through seventh grade will have the chance to take at least two of six newly designed enrichment classes.
“We wanted to be a lot more intentional with [enrichment] offerings,” says Bree MacPhee Lyon, the district’s summer school director. She says there are “two that have a very heavy STEM focus — Technology and Robotics, and Engineering with LEGOs.” There’s also an art class (Art Expressions), a movement class (Moving, Fun and Fitness) and one that focuses on the environment and experiential learning (Taking Learning Outdoors). World Explorers, depending on the teacher, will explore “different pieces of world geography and world history, or it could be specific to a certain area,” adds MacPhee Lyon.
For Joseph, these classes provide an opportunity to continue supporting students who need the most help, while letting them have some fun along the way.
“They’ll get a lot more opportunity to do something really interesting and exciting,” Joseph says. “I think that these classes are a good opportunity for kids to get to engage in some really, really cool material.”
Learning with LEGOs
Nicole Lendborg, a positive behavior interventionist in the district, developed the curriculum for this summer’s Engineering with LEGOs class. She has been experimenting with similar activities in summer school the past few years.
After researching what LEGO engineering curriculum was already out there, Lendborg built her own seesaws, levers, ramps, and domino-like chain reactions to come up with material for three weeks.
While literacy and math classes run the entire six weeks of summer school, enrichment classes only last three weeks, giving students the opportunity to take more than one.
“Each class begins with a speed build,” says Lendborg in an email. “The great part about this is that the creations can never be wrong as they are explained by the student. Many tree houses have had wheels and, one year, a student made everything with wings — even a flying apple!”
After the speed build, students go through a lesson focused on science, technology, engineering or math. If there’s extra time in the 80-minute block, students get free play. During the last week of class, they’ll also create a stop-motion animation movie.
For Lendborg, this is the kind of class that gives students who often feel behind the chance to create and feel successful.
“I stress that nothing they build can be wrong, they just have to try,” she says. “It offers a chance for students to interact socially and work through conflicts in a structured setting.”
Having a specific curriculum instead of more open-ended play leads to larger gains in learning, says Joseph.
“When they’re in the Engineering with LEGOs class they’re actively working on problem-solving skills… they have quite a lot of math and science skills that they’re actively using in that class.”
Rising enrollment
MacPhee Lyon joined the district as the summer school director in fall 2016. That year 4,900 students, grades 4K through 12, participated in summer school. In 2017, 5,530 students enrolled. As of June 15, 6,084 students are signed up.
She suspects this year’s increase is due in part to a new policy allowing parents to enroll the siblings of children recommended for summer school at the elementary level — even if the siblings don’t need summer school.
“The changes that we made with the sibling piece were based on parent feedback. I had this one mom say to me, ‘Look I’m a single mom of two children, and I have one that’s qualified, one that hasn’t, so I have to figure out two different sets of plans for my [kids] just because one qualified and one didn’t,’” MacPhee Lyon recalls. “That just is not fair to families, so we completely reimagined what sibling and sibling support looks like at summer school to ensure that we could be family-centric.”
Farrah Johnson — a mother of six — says the change is a good move for the district.
All five of her school-aged children qualified for summer school this year, so while she doesn’t need to utilize the sibling program, she’s glad it’s there.
“I think that part is great because it’s hard for single parents like myself to situate [their kids] for the summer and keep them involved,” Johnson says. “Summer school is good anyway, it keeps them connected with school.”
She predicts her children — at least the ones in first, third and fifth grade — will enjoy summer school more than ever, thanks to the addition of the enrichment classes.
For Lendborg, all these changes chalk up to a better, more well-rounded experience for all of the school district’s summer school students: “I would say as a whole MMSD summer school has been working to offer the most equitable experience for all students and to ensure that along with learning skills, fun is part of the day.”
