North Mason schools take stock of summer school

Kirk Boxleitner | Aug 31, 20230

During the North Mason School Board’s Aug. 17 meeting, summer school principal Laura Pugh and teacher Rachel Mayo were joined by Hawkins Middle School students Tora Kawai-Seguin, Zevin King and Rukan Bruemmer as they presented a film the students made during summer school.

Pugh reported the summer school program had ended the previous week, with literacy support for students in grades four through eight, and “credit recovery” for students in grades 10 through 12.

Over three weeks, breakfast and lunch were made available for summer school students and “any student in the community.” Food service staff told Pugh they served 1,078 meals, and the school district’s transportation team staffed four bus routes “to get our students here from literally every corner of the district attendance area, so that no student had to be denied access to the program, if they qualified and were willing to come.”

Pugh said 78 students attended all or part of the summer school, with the credit recovery program drawing 20 students, 13 of whom completed one or more courses, for a total of 27 courses.

“There are some students who were unable to complete a course in that three-week time frame, so we’re still working on a plan to get them to finish,” Pugh said.

Pugh elaborated on how the classroom at Hawkins Middle School focused on social and emotional learning, by helping students with conflict management and relationship-building, “just by working on story-writing, and how characters had conflicts and resolved them.”

The summer school film festival Aug. 10 saw students prepare 18 short films, including one written and recorded in English and Spanish, which was the one the trio of students created and then screened for the board during the meeting.

Pugh explained how teachers used some GLAD (guided language acquisition design) strategies to support their students’ writing, and added that all the students who took part in the program also acquired access to a lot of grade-level reading materials, including several they were able to take with them.

Originally tasked with producing a minute-long film, the trio were among the middle schoolers who responded enthusiastically when Mayo told them they could go up to three minutes, which they did by writing and recording what Mayo deemed “really neat dialogue.”

Mayo praised the three students for going “above and beyond” with their film, as they “really took the curriculum they were given and ran with it in 12 days,” devoting what she estimated to be nine to 10 hours of work to producing three minutes and 17 seconds of edited film.

Mayo further encouraged the board to watch all the summer school students’ films, “because they’re exceptional.”

The short film, “Sam’s No Internet,” starred two computer-animated characters in a comedy about kids trying to access the internet, complete with background music, sound effects and an absurdly long Wi-Fi password that drew chuckles from adults in the audience.