Summer school, as offered by the district, is an online based educational program that takes place during the three month period between school years; the purpose is to allow students to redeem their credit that they may have lost during the prior school year, all at a price. 

Despite the benefits summer school offers, its cost is one that deters both parents and students from participating in the program. 

If you take one class over the summer, it runs about $250 according to guidance counselor Joyce Marburger.

Instead of charging for the summer school program, we should allocate our efforts to make it more publicly available for the ultimate benefit of the student body. 

As it stands the district’s summer school is online with all the main courses and a select number of electives available to the student attendees. 

Most of whom take summer school to fix their prior grade, with only a couple students taking college classes for the enrichment of their education. 

Under a twenty-six required credit system for graduation, it isn’t hard to see why. If you fail three classes worth three whole points during your four year stay at high school, then you will have to repeat a year to remedy those lost grades. 

Summer school allows students to make up for this work over the summer to avoid a prolonged high school attendance that’s exacerbated by the deterioration of one’s grades. 

However, with the current system of summer education, we now have an official price tag for the classes we take daily and the cost for failure in the school. 

This flaw becomes apparent when we compare the school district to another, specifically one in Fife, Washington that takes a widely different approach with its summer school program, the Fife Public School District. 

Establishing itself on the upper west coast, Fife High School’s summer program offers a cost free campus for students to join both physically and virtually depending on the course itself. 

Topics like technical writing can be taken via the computer while something like culinary arts allows students to physically participate within the building itself; the same goes for many of the main courses that require a teacher, giving a greater chance for students who failed to get the help they need. 

However, all this can be contributed to nothing but personnel preferences without any results laid across the table. The reason why the Fife School District’s summer program has proven superior over the typical district’s is the graduation rates between the two. 

According to the official U.S. News website, Fife High School enrolls 877 students with a 94 percent graduation rate. From the same site, our high school enrolls 769 students with a 90 percent graduation rate. 

If we do the math rounding down, 52 of the 877 students in Fife High don’t graduate, while 76 of the 769 students in our school don’t pass according to those statistics. 

However despite this, from the U.S. News website, our school is ultimately ranked higher over other scores such as proficiency that involves math and reading. The only thing Fife High School accomplishes better on paper is the graduation rates of its enrolled students. 

The main factor with all of this is, in my opinion, the summer school program. The Fife school district’s free courses allow students from any household, regardless of income, to attend these classes for both enrichment and redemption that gives them an upper hand in the school system as a whole. 

Our district, however, blocks off many attendees of its online centered summer school program with its expensive entry requirement for the courses that some students need to take for graduation. 

Instead of giving free courses over the summer like Fife High, the district pushes the failed classes to the later years of a student’s high school career–meaning that despite being a tenth grader, you could still take ninth grade classes while also dealing with the contemporary tenth grader classes at the same time.

For more information about our summer school program, click here.