Going beyond the average summer school curriculum
By Valerie Nevens
parlierpost@yahoo.com
For 323 elementary and 60 or so junior and high school students attending summer school at Ben Benavidez Elementary and Parlier Junior High School this summer, neither scenario is the case.
According to Angelica Gomez, the state director of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, which operates the summer program, the focus is on in-depth learning. Typical programs, she acknowledged, don’t address the problems students had during the year that caused them to fail, but the foundation, which has been serving Parlier for four summers now, implements a curriculum that is easier to follow for kids with different learning styles and needs.
“Our goal as the Cesar Chavez Foundation is to see students become successful by preparing them with the necessary academic skills,” Gomez said. “Empowering our students through education will allow them to rewrite their futures.”
The program focuses on six key areas in math and six key areas in language arts and writing by providing teachers with booklets composed of 20 lesson plans on each of the 12 total areas. Booklets for seventh graders include Using Algebra, Using Geometry, Strategies for Solving Word Problems, Detecting Probability and Averages, Recognizing Cause and Effect, Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences, Number Sense, Main Ideas and Details, Interpreting Graphs and Charts, Compare and Contrast and Making Predictions.
Each grade level has a similar set of booklets designed to bring kids up to the basic skill level for their grade.
Each day of the four-week program students are given a few lessons from each booklet.
Some teachers choose to focus on one subject during the morning session, which is from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., and another during the afternoon session, which ends at 2:30 p.m. Other teachers like to mix up the lessons.
Esther Mendiola, who works as an English Language Program (ELP) teacher at Parlier Junior High during the school year, said she likes to jump around.
“Going back and forth allows them to focus better because they don’t get bored with one subject,” Mendiola said. Mendiola also implements Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) in her classroom.
“It’s a strategy of teaching that reinforces learning better because the kids interact with the white boards and write and hold up their answers to questions so I can check for understanding and figure out who knows the material and who needs more help,” Mendiola said. “This is constant, I explain for a few minutes than they work on a question, so its also more interactive and I can see right away when someone doesn’t get something. It’s much better than standing up there lecturing the whole time and not knowing if they understand.”
Zharida DeFendis, a math teacher at Parlier High School during the school year, uses the white board strategy as well. One of her summer school students, Lydia Castaneda said she enjoys the class and finds DeFendis’s teaching style effective.
“I was home schooled so I don’t know how Algebra is taught during the regular year, but I think Ms. DeFendis explains everything well and its good that there is one-on-one instruction, which is helpful,” Castaneda said.
Mario Lopez, who directs the program for the junior high and high school students, said many of the students in the program were performing below basic during the regular school year, based on pre-asessments taken by the foundation. By zeroing in on the problem areas, as the curriculum booklets do, and by offering smaller classroom sizes, Lopez said the post-asessments should show the kids are improving.
“Its an intervention for students that have been failing courses and it allows them to recover credits,” Lopez said. “That is why most of them are here because they need to improve their grades. Most wouldn’t come to summer school if they didn’t have to, but there are a couple students this year who got a D in a course and are retaking it because they want at least a C to get into some colleges.”
Martin Mares, the new Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction, said this is the overall goal–to get Parlier students on the college path.
“We want to develop a college bound culture in Parlier Unified,” Mares said.
To do this, Mares and school board members Melissa Cano and Mary Helen Villanueva agreed that students need to be given every opportunity possible by the district.
“Everything we can do to help the students pass their courses and think about college helps,” Villanueva said. She added that she is impressed by the Cesar Chavez Foundation’s program.