School may have officially ended for the year, but summer learning continues.
Ector County ISD will start its summer learning program Monday for elementary, middle and high school students.
It also includes Camp SIP (Scholars in Progress), credit recovery and acceleration and enrichment activities.
Superintendent Scott Muri predicts 6,000 students will participate.
Enrichment classes will run the gamut from cooking and coding to robotics and a lot of STEM activities, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction Lisa Wills said.
There also will be ballet folklorico, theater, drums and other things students may not be able to take during the regular school year.
Wills said 2,656 elementary students signed up and 1,506 middle school students. This does not include bilingual or high school students. There will be 229 teachers instructing those students.
Elementary summer learning will be held Monday through Thursday until July 19 from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. with lunch.
The elementary summer learning sites will be Lamar, San Jacinto, Zavala, Cameron, Cavazos, Buddy West, Milam, Burnet, Blanton, Jordan and Alamo STEAM Academy.
Camp SIP will be at Blackshear and go for two weeks, June 12-22. Participating students can go to that and come back to summer learning.
Middle school will run from June 5-June 29 from 9 a.m. to noon. The middle schools host their own, but Bowie Middle School will be at George H.W. Bush New Tech Odessa because air conditioning work is being done on campus.
The high schools will have summer learning from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and then 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The sites will be Permian and Odessa High schools.
If they are taking an end-of-course exam, they will finish June 22 because that’s the last day of testing, Wills said. But the high schools will stay open for credit recovery and credit acceleration.
“We leave that open until July 19… it gives those seniors more time to get credits that they need to graduate in the summer. And then summer graduation is on the 27th of July,” Wills said.
The Edgenuity course, an online credit recovery/credit acceleration program, will now be incorporating FEV Tutor, one of the district’s virtual tutoring companies.
“We have teachers in there that help when kids get stuck. But we’re also using FEV Tutor … and the kids if they’re working on something like calculus and there’s not a teacher in there that can help them with calculus, they can do an on-demand tutor and they’ll come right on and help them with that, so they’re not struggling through those courses. I think that’s going to be beneficial for them,” Wills said.
Boot camp for SAT will be June 12-16 and June 19-23 at OHS and PHS.
Wills said summer learning has been effective because they bring in all students.
“We try to make it very engaging and hands-on for them and geared towards, of course, our standards of what they need to be successful in the upcoming grade … We see a lot of (gap-closing) growth with our students,” Wills said.
