Lakeside reaches out to summer academy students

With an Extended Learning Opportunities grant, the Lakeside Union School District is using a portion of the funds for its Lakeside Summer School Academy to be held in two sessions in July. LUSD Educational Services Coordinator Kelly Gilbert said the official language of the grant is “loss mitigation”. Gilbert presented the details of the summer school at the Lakeside Community Collaborative meeting on May 24.

“We know COVID has turned things around, especially for some of our most marginalized students, it has hit them particularly hard,” she said.

Gilbert said the district has done a lot of work on equity. How to have conversations about it and how to make your schools more inclusive and appropriate for all students. Gilbert said many students are considered “at risk”, but the neighborhood is changing that language.

“We no longer use that language here at Lakeside,” she said. “It’s a label put on a child and it limits its potential, so we prefer to use the term over promise.”

Gilbert said the summer academy is focused and intentionally designed to serve its promising students. She said they are changing the narrative of what the promise means and changing the educational trajectory of these students.

“The first part of this story is the difficult conversation of who is invited to it. We have a lot of families here at Lakeside who hear the summer school and think, “How do I register? »», She declared. “For us, in these critical conversations about really wanting to help kids who need it most, we’re going to be offering a different kind of option this year. We used a careful and data-driven process. Think of it as intense matchmaking. We are doing an exercise to find the students who benefit the most from this summer school intervention which will take place over two sessions in July. The kids will go to school four days a week for two weeks and we’ll choose kids who not only need extra support with academics, but also socially and emotionally.

Gilbert said the pandemic has prompted students not only to ‘take action’ but also to ‘take action’.

“These are students that you often don’t see, and they slip through the cracks,” she said. “We use a student risk scouting skill to determine which students exhibit these internalizing behaviors as well as to find students who may benefit from them. Once we have conversations with our families, we will do the job of inviting our children. It’s not that you have to go to summer school, it’s more like, ‘Oh my God, you can go to summer school. You have been selected. ‘ By inviting children to this opportunity, I think it will be extremely fruitful. “

Gilbert said he will run small classes with 10 students per teacher and the bar is high. She said the promising students, many of whom also have solid attendance and the willingness to work hard, so decisions about who to attend summer academy are intentional.

“We are looking specifically at our special populations, including young people in host families, the homeless, English learners, students with disabilities, really trying to create these opportunities for all of our students, but especially students who often find themselves on the sidelines. For us, that was an important part of the conversation, ”she said.

For K2 students, the program will focus on phonetics, for 3-5 it will be fluency, and for 6-8 it will be data science. Gilbert said they were also looking for students in his immersion program, looking at the same matchmaking metrics, selecting students to take an immersion track from his summer experience, as learning is just as important to them.

“For all Lakeside students, no matter where they’re sitting, we also have some really cool summer activities for them in terms of distance learning and things they can use,” Gilbert said. “It’s quite different from a typical summer school experience one might imagine, and we hope our equity foundation will help us move forward and continue to do so over the years. . “

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