July 3, 2004

Midterm reviews praise program; Summer classes mix activities, academics.
by Cory De Vera

As students form a circle around a girl using a bicycle pump next to a water-filled plastic soda bottle, Shelley Sanders’ rocket-building class knows what will happen. The students’ anticipation adds to their excitement.

Pop! The rocket flies, water sprinkles down and the class cheers. Some elementary school students run across the school ground, chasing the water-and-air-powered rocket.

"I like the afternoon classes better than the morning ones," said Tolando Woodson, who will enter fifth grade in the fall. "Here we are learning to build rockets."

Tolando is one of thousands of students who signed up for the Newton Learning "Summer Adventure," a controversial five-week program that ended its third week yesterday.

Some parents have raised eyebrows because the program offers students cash and other prizes for attendance. Transportation glitches during the first week angered many parents because hundreds of students were bused to schools to which they weren’t assigned.

Newton Learning, a division of Edison Schools, says its curriculum and approach to summer study will improve student achievement.

Regardless of whether that becomes a reality, summer school in Columbia looks different from in years past.

Last year Columbia Public Schools offered a free basic-skills program in summer school that aimed to help lagging students catch up. It also offered a popular tuition-based enrichment program at Smithton Middle School, where students could pay to take one class or four classes.

The Newton Learning program is free and open to all students and seems to merge the district’s academic and enrichment lessons.

Elementary students attend four core classes each morning: reading, language arts, math and either social studies or science. Afternoons are set aside for electives, including some that resemble the enrichment classes that were popular at Smithton: rocket-building, lifetime sports, cartooning and computer games.
Most elementary school teachers in the Newton program typically teach the same core course and same elective course several times a day, as most children change classes several times each day.

All that moving around in a building some students hadn’t been in previously was difficult for some at first, said teachers interviewed by the Tribune.

"A lot of them weren’t ready for the environment: a big school with tons of kids," said Clint Darr, a fourth-grade teacher in the summer program at Lange. "Like it or not, the incentives helped them learn good behavior."

Elementary students earn four tickets each day for showing good effort and good behavior in morning classes. Tickets at the end of the day are placed in a drawing for toys or passes for admission to the city’s Activity & Recreation Center.

Darr said he disagrees with criticism that the reward system conditions students to expect rewards.

"That’s definitely not true," he said. "What it does is, it helps them learn the expectations. Once they know that, eventually you don’t have to do it anymore. I definitely used the tickets to help them learn good behavior."

While visiting two classes at Paxton Keeley Elementary School and two classes at Lange yesterday, a Tribune reporter saw a teacher waiting for kids to get in a straight line and get quiet before dismissing them for lunch.

Another teacher told a student her words to another student weren’t respectful. But there were no serious discipline problems, and students seemed interested, whether they were writing stories, figuring averages, playing computer games or shooting off rockets.

Sally Kim, a fourth-grade-going-on-fifth-grade student at Paxton Keeley, said she likes summer school this year more than classes she took last summer at Smithton.

"Last year I took a class where you learn how to make your own Web sites and a couple of math classes," she said. "This year it’s more challenging - the math and stuff - because it’s fifth-grade work. Last year I was mixed with third, fourth and fifth grade, and it was easy."

Sanders, a fifth-grade teacher assigned to Paxton Keeley Elementary, said she’s impressed with the math curriculum. She said the language arts curriculum differs from what she’s used during the academic year.

Her opinion of the program has fluctuated over the weeks.

"Is it a good thing or a bad thing?" Sanders asked rhetorically. "I’d rather have them here with us learning in a positive environment than at home by themselves. And I can honestly say the kids are learning a lot. They’ve made a tremendous adjustment."