Fresno’s summer school enrollment surges as students try to balance learning and burnout

Summer school enrollment surged for Fresno Unified schools following a challenging year of remote learning brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

About 17,000 FUSD students attended the first day of summer classes on Monday, the most in at least the last four years, district officials confirmed. Many parents who spoke with The Bee’s Education Lab said they fear their students fell behind academically while learning from home.

But so-called “learning loss” or “unfinished learning” is difficult to measure. Fresno Unified officials say they’re still working on a program they say will help determine where students are academically versus where they should be according to grade-level standards.

According to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, about 83% of parents said children are falling behind academically during the pandemic, 64% said students are falling behind “by a lot.”

Summer school student Keyera Dickson said staying motivated is easier with in-person learning.

“If you’re by yourself in the house, you won’t get the help you need,” she said.

Dickson said that, during the pandemic, she would usually keep her camera off since she had many distractions in her house. With the in-person summer camp, she said she can get help from her teachers and her fellow student peers.

“We were just laughing over there, having a good time, but if I was online, I wouldn’t even know anybody, and I wouldn’t even want to turn my camera on,” Dickson said.

But parents and teachers are also trying to balance learning concerns over grades and graduation credits with the mental health needs of their students, many of whom were traumatized after living in fear for more than a year.

The pandemic, coupled with months of nationwide social unrest and, in California, months of wildfires that drove people from their homes, have renewed fears over how young people are coping. In recent months, school and health officials issued dire warnings about increased drug use and reports of self-harm among students.

Such concerns caused Katie Jerkovich to give her daughter a learning break by skipping summer school altogether.

“After the hell they went through this year because of our board, they 100% need a break and to go back to school like normal in the fall. I won’t put them through any more pain,” Jerkovich said.

Other parents, like Erika Ireland, remain concerned about coronavirus infections even as cases continue to slow amid rising vaccination rates. She wants her son to continue learning online for now.

“I’m not ready for my child to go to school face-to-face until there is a vaccine for children,” Ireland said. “I’m not so much worried about him getting COVID as I am for the aftereffects.”

But for many parents urging their children to catch up on schoolwork, frustrations are mounting over the FUSD summer school options, which the parents say are too limited both in terms of classroom space and academic opportunities.

Academies and summer camp

Distance learning remains an option for many FUSD students this summer, but district leaders encouraged parents to enroll students in traditional summer school.

“We feel strongly that the more students we can get back onto campus, the higher degree of success they will have,” Assistant Superintendent of College & Career Readiness Jeremy Ward told the Education Lab. “Whether it be closing learning gaps or getting the credits needed to graduate, all of that goes better in-person.”

After only two days of summer camp, both teachers and students said they felt the benefits of in-person learning.

Krishnna Reyes, a Roosevelt high school teacher in career technical education, works with professors from Reedley College and New Vision Aviation to teach FUSD students about aviation and engineering this summer.

Reyes said the aviation summer camp teaches kids the practical application of math and the fundamentals of physics.

“You get more perspective into the math of building a rocket. I didn’t understand it until the teacher broke down the math. I didn’t know how to write 1/4 on a ruler. It gave me a different perspective for learning math,” said student Zamaury Dickson.

In addition to hands-on learning, Reyes said students have been bonding.

“They are not all coming from one school. You have multiple high schools here and from different grades, for them to come out of being at home the whole year. From what I see, they are loving it. They didn’t even know each other, but now they are actually bonding, and I think that social-emotional piece is what has been missing,” Reyes said.

Many parents remain frustrated despite more summer school options

But while Fresno Unified has beefed up summer school enrollment, many parents — such as those whose children are English Language learners — have said they remain frustrated with what they described as too few options and poor communication from the schools.

Ireland wanted her son to take dual-language-immersion online classes over the summer to help him learn Spanish. But that wasn’t an option for her because, she said, her son gets good grades, and most FUSD summer school classes are aimed at helping students who need to close learning gaps or catch up on graduation credits.

“Teachers have to recommend the children who need summer school,” Ireland said.

Ireland eventually reached an agreement with the schools to let her son use a Spanish-language academic program online, but she said she remains concerned about the limited space for English-learning students.

“There is only one teacher teaching for the DI program,” Ireland said. “You really only have a small amount of student spots available. That’s the part that, as a parent, I’m frustrated about.”

Parents like Alis Aleman said EL students in Fresno have traditionally lagged behind other city students in test scores and graduation rates, and, like many parents, she’s concerned the pandemic made that gap even wider. Aleman wants her daughter to take EL summer school classes but said it’s not an option because the limited class size has been reserved for lower-performing students who need help making up credits.

Students classified as English Learners make up 18% of the entire Fresno Unified student population, according to the California School Dashboard.

Communication breakdown

Communicating with the district’s more than 73,000 families has been an enormous challenge since the early days of the pandemic and remains difficult despite improvements over time, FUSD officials have acknowledged.

Although the district sent out phone messages, email blasts, and social media posts, “communication with students not being in school is a challenge,” Ward said.

“It’s complicated,” he added.

But those complications compound frustrations for at least some parents who said they tried to be proactive about summer school enrollment but struggled to get information from the schools.

Parent Esmeralda Diaz said she received a call from the district letting her know her daughter was enrolled in summer classes, but, Diaz said, the FUSD staffer who called couldn’t tell which classes or even which school her child needed to attend.

“Even now, nobody has given me concrete information,” Diaz told the Ed Lab in an interview last week.

Parent Francisca Damaso said she had a similar experience trying to find out how many days a week and exactly when her child needed to report to class.

But even once those issues were ironed out, Diaz said she remained unhappy with the available options for English-learning students. Summer-long English-learner classes would be a big help and a good place to start, she said, instead of just a few weeks.

“Because we all know the exams to reclassify students is in September and October,” Diaz said.

Damaso is also not happy with summer academies but feels they are still necessary for her daughter to succeed.

Closing academic gaps

Fresno Unified students have two options for summer school locally.

FUSD’s summer academies serve as a more academically focused summer school that helps students recover graduation credits and close some learning gaps.

Elementary and middle school students chose between online and in-person summer school, while all high school summer school classes will be taught in person. High school students seeking to make credit recovery online can do so through the J.E. Young program.

But while school leaders across the nation scramble to help students catch up, after a year of stress and trauma, FUSD officials say their summer school classes focus more on helping students feel supported and less on letter-grade achievement.

Kindergarten through eighth-grade students will not receive grades for their summer school work. The goal of summer academies for those students is to help bring the child up to the math or reading levels they should be at according to their grade level.

Students can simultaneously enroll in summer camps and summer academies, mixing both academics and fun, Ward said.

“It’s more like seeing where they are at with really important skills and supporting those skills.”

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab on our website.