The idea of summer school could be a drag after a jam-packed nine months of regular school, but for many Sedona Red Rock High School students who weren’t able to attend in person for over two months, live summer school is a refreshing, and welcome, change.

Sedona Oak Creek School District Assistant Superintendent Deana DeWitt said it was “amazing” seeing the eight students walk through the doors the morning of June 1 for the first day of summer school.

“We miss them, of course. That’s what all of us are in this for,” DeWitt said of the students. “It’s funny because the students, even coming for summer school for something like math and extra support in math — a difficult subject for a lot of these students — they’re still excited to come and to be here, so it was great.”

The students walked through the plastic-lined hall, which was getting primed for a fresh coat of paint, into the cafeteria, which acts as the classroom for the morning and afternoon math courses on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The cafeteria was chosen as the classroom as its open air atmosphere and large amount of space makes it ideal for the physical distancing requirements in place. DeWitt said the eight students or less in each class — along with the
teacher and an aid for translating English to Spanish — were able to spread out in the cafeteria and there was less chance to come in contact with surfaces than a normal classroom, without doors and desks.

“It’s a pretty ‘sterile’ environment without any clutter or unnecessary furnishings [or] materials,” she said. “Benches [are] attached to tables instead of separate chairs to pull out,
push in, etc.”

Because of the ample room, teachers and students are not required to wear masks or face coverings, but they are available for those who wish to.

“Our custodians will ensure the tables/benches are disinfected between sessions and students will be assigned their own class materials [and] Chromebook,” DeWitt said.

Though the in-person classes may be small, specially reserved for students whose counselors thought they would benefit the most from the live help, the district is serving 83 students this summer between the live classes and the online classes.

“This year we’re really fortunate to be able to offer all of our summer school classes for free online, so I think we have a much larger percentage of our student body who are taking summer courses,” DeWitt said. “Of course, not larger [for the live classes], because we did have to cap it. Our math classes are capped. They filled up and so we were only able to take the first 16 that applied for enrollment.”

The two planned live English classes, however, had to be canceled because not enough students showed up.

“I was really looking forward to being in class again, but I understand parents’ caution given the circumstances,” English teacher Briana Young said. “I have full classes online through a personalized learning platform, which students are working hard on earning a semester’s credit during the month of June. It’s intensive, but most kids seem to be used to the online platform by now, having completed the last quarter of the year in a similar way.”

The online English, math, science and history classes are free this year because the state is offering funding to offset schools that are providing extra summer instruction. In normal years, families pay a small fee for their teens to attend.

Those students taking the online classes are able to get credit for the content areas, whether they want to accelerate and get ahead early or are trying to improve their grade from when they took the course over the school year. Those taking the live classes will receive an elective
credit.

“I think many of these [in-class] students were receiving extra support prior to the school closure. But when the school closure happened, they didn’t have the ability, so we went to online instruction or virtual instruction for all of our students and the students who were struggling prior to school closure absolutely were impacted by that closure in the sense that they couldn’t go to after school tutoring or lunch time tutoring with their teachers,” DeWitt said. “So we definitely saw that as a need and wanted to make sure that we were able to provide something like that to those students.”

However, just because the students are taking the classes physically at the school this summer doesn’t mean there isn’t at-home work, too.

“Guys, I’m telling ya, if you want to get better you gotta do at least a half-hour a day,” math instructor James Vogler told his students after three hours of integered word problems.