This year, the district’s summer school program offered in-person and online courses for credit recovery as well as in math, history and English. In a continuation of a trend that started in 2020, online classes continue to be the more popular option, with roughly double the enrollment.
According to summer school assistant principal Matthew Torrens, who held the role of summer school principal, 198 students enrolled in online summer school in comparison to only 98 enrolled in in-person classes, with the majority of students coming from Los Gatos High.
“The biggest benefit of online summer school for students is that it allows them to take a rigorous course at their leisure, so they don’t have to be here. They just have to have access to the internet and the computer,” Torrens said. “Summer school also provides a service for our special ed students, as well as our post secondary students.”
New to the summer curriculum was an “In-Person Ramp up to Precalculus Honors”, a two-week long summer course that tries to prepare 10th through 12th graders who took Algebra 2 to Precalculus Honors. It is currently the only “ramp up” summer class offered. It was taught by math teacher PJ Yim.
“Most of it was what I had learned, but just going deeper into the topic and covering a few different things as well,” sophomore Dhriya Darji said.
After last year’s large numbers of students dropping from honors to regular classes, the school implemented a placement test for students like Darji going from a regular class to an honors counterpart the next year.
The course was highly recommended to properly prepare students for the placement test at the end of summer. Darji believed that the material was mostly what she had already covered in Algebra 2, only diving deeper and looking into a few more topics.
Students who participated in summer school were also eligible to participate in the community projects offered, such as spending lunch breaks making wigs through the Magic Yarn Project, a nonprofit looking to create wigs for cancer patients who had lost their hair due to chemotherapy.
Courtesy of Tanya De La Cruz
The final product of the two hour project that 90 students participated in.
The final product of the two hour project that 90 students participated in.One junior boy told The Falcon also attended summer school, but for different reasons. After struggling with English 10 during the school year, he looked to replace his grade by taking it again during the summer.
Despite having difficulties during the school year, summer school was an opportunity for the junior to learn and earn his credits for graduation. With fewer students participating in it than a regular school class, he said the environment was considerably less pressure filled.
“I found the summer school experience to be a lot less stressful than school,” the junior said. “My teachers were very supportive, actively looking to help students that were struggling.”
