Students Jenevie Gutierrez, left, Heaven Enciso, center, and Skylar DeJarnett enjoy high tea during Mountain Lion Time at McMillan Elementary School Friday, June 4, 2023.
Friday, June 9, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Summer school at James B. McMillan Elementary is informal compared to the regular school year, but the gears are still turning in these students’ minds, according to school officials.
“There’s a whole lot of learning going on; it’s just not traditional academics,” said Assistant Principal Gerold Petroskey as he observed a classroom where a handful of pupils were having a tea party.
“Summer acceleration” at McMillan and other schools across the Clark County School District features lessons in fundamental reading, writing and math mixed with physical activity and arts and crafts to keep kids sharp in between school years. It’s a mix of typical school and educational summer camp, which Petrosky says not only helps academically but socially and emotionally, especially for the younger students.
Pre-pandemic, CCSD offered the usual summer school for middle and high school students who needed to make up credits or wanted to get ahead in their studies; elementary students did not have summer school, and older students had more traditionally rigorous academics.
Educators know that some “summer slide,” the struggle students encounter right after they return to school from summer break, is normal.
But the coronavirus pandemic was not normal. Though test scores are coming back up, state data show that scores in CCSD from 2021 onward are below the pre-pandemic baseline. Programs like summer acceleration are here to help with that.
With federal pandemic relief funds, CCSD started offering expanded, tuition-free summer school in 2021 to ease students back into full-time in-person learning, more than a year after schools went to remote learning. Summer acceleration is available all day with busing and lunch included at almost every CCSD campus, to all grade levels.
Educators att McMillan, which is near Summerlin off East Lake Mead Boulevard, focused on math last summer, Principal Nikki Longmore said. They grouped summer acceleration students by math test scores and tracked their progress on the following year’s standardized exams.
McMillan’s summer students didn’t have as much of a “summer slide,” she said.
“They had been able to maintain and recall so much of those (concepts) they had learned during summer acceleration,” Longmore said.
Districtwide enrollment figures are pending for summer learning, which includes the three-week summer acceleration and the two, back-to-back three-week sessions of traditional secondary summer school.
Summer acceleration runs through June 16, while secondary summer school runs through July 10.
At McMillan, which enrolls about 500 students during the regular year, about 70 children report for summer acceleration, Petrosky said.
On a recent day, youngsters between first and second grades went all in on watermelons.
They learned how the fruit grows for a science lesson.
For English language arts, they learned vocabulary and turned it into acrostic poems, in which the first letter of each line spells out a thematic word or phrase when read vertically. One of the poems pinned to the wall:Watering/awesome/trailing/elongated/rind/mouth-watering/eat/lip-smacking/odd/nourishing. Or, W-A-T-E-R-M-E-L-O-N.
For arts, they made construction paper watermelon slices. Dabs of glossy black finger paint popped out as seeds.
“I learned that watermelons start as blossoms,” one pupil said. Another offered that a watermelon was 92% water.
As the day wound down, the kids had a period called “Mountain Lion Time,” which Petrosky said encourages social development and positive child-adult relationships through fun activities. Some kids played cornhole or did light yoga. The tea party attendees, no older than second grade, made fascinator hats out of headbands and shower puffs and nibbled on finger sandwiches they prepared themselves. They tried warm tea, some for the first time, with lemonade as a backup in case the tea wasn’t to their tastes.
In a room across the hall from the tea party, evidence of traditional learning was all around, like a poster outlining the elements of a story and worksheets using pizza slices to illustrate fractions.
Classical academics achieved for the day, fourth-grade teacher Marc Stentz then brought out a putter and showed his students how to tip ping pong balls through a hole cut into an upside-down paper plate.
“We’re having a blast,” he said.
