Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Hornet Adventure is under way
By Laura Schuler, C-T city editor

It's been a little more than a week since classes in the Chillicothe R-2 School District were dismissed for the regular school year but yesterday (Tuesday) many kindergarten through ninth grade students found themselves back in the classroom for the first day of The Hornet Summer School Adventure.

According to district officials, there were 632 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and 127 others in high school for a total of 759 students.

Superintendent Dale Wallace said that those numbers are about what he and other district administrators have expected.

"We'd thought we'd be in the 700 range," he said today.

This is the second consecutive year that the district has contracted with Newton Learning for its summer school program, and according to the three summer school administrators, the first day of summer school went very well.

"It (the first day) was so much better than the first day of school last year," Bryan Prewitt said Tuesday afternoon. He explained that both the teachers and the students had a better idea of what to expect this year.

"It was a much better start," he said.

Prewitt, who supervises the summer school program for students in sixth through ninth grades at the Chillicothe Middle School, said that having three sites for summer school instead of only two is also proving beneficial. . . . . .