Summer vacation is being delayed for 3,000  Aurora Public Schools students who are part of a pricey experiment the district is hoping will pay off in more proficient learners in the fall and increased CSAP scores next spring.

It’s called “Fifth Block,” and it’s the brainchild of superintendent John L. Barry and district officials who spent the past 18 months designing a program to extend the school year, at least for some students.

What it means is an extra 23 days of class time – rigorous, full-day instruction, not the half-day remedial instruction typically associated with summer school – for a group of struggling students who could most benefit from the additional effort. And it’s happening in every single school in the district, not just a few satellite campuses.

“Our board of education asked our staff to look at our two-year calendar and see what we might be able to do to most effectively impact the learning of as many students as possible,” said Deputy Superintendent Tony Van Gytenbeek. “When we went through the research, we continually came up with two key points critical to student achievement: quality of instruction and length of the school year. So we wanted to extend the school year for a targeted group of students, and make sure those students were in front of the very best classroom teachers.”

The additional four-and-a-half weeks of school began last week and will continue through late June. The voluntary program was opened to students who have shown good academic progress in the past year, and have consistent attendance, but whose skills aren’t quite ranked proficient.

Historically, the 30,000-student district has provided extra support during the summer for its high-achieving students, as well as for its low performers. But not much has been available for those students in the middle who aren’t quite where they need to be academically, school officials say.

“I think this is a fabulous opportunity for these kids,” said Debbie Gerkin, principal at Crawford Elementary School, which serves a largely immigrant population just north of Colfax Avenue in northwest Aurora. “We know there’s a lot of summer learning loss, and that’s especially true of Crawford’s lower socio-economic population. But these kids will be completely engaged in learning for an extra month. This helps them to get one more step ahead of the game come fall.”

At Crawford, which normally houses 540 K-5 students, 100 students will be hitting the books for Fifth Block. Many will be taught by the same teacher they had during the regular school year, or by the teacher they’ll have come fall. They’ll spend 2 ½ hours every day working to improve their reading and writing, and they’ll spend another 2 ½ hours working on math. Breakfast and lunch will also be served, just as during the regular school year, and the district is providing their transportation to and from school.

Cost to the students and their families is free. Cost to the district, which is paying a premium to get master teachers to staff the classrooms for the extra we days, is about $500,000.

“We’re paying teachers at a per diem rate rather than an hourly rate,” said Van Gytenbeek. “Normally in summer school, teachers are paid $25 an hour. But during Fifth Block, they’re being paid the rate they earn during the regular teaching contract, which is quite a bit more.”

The district is tapping its reserves to fund the Fifth Block session this year, and possibly next year as well.

“It’s one-time money because we didn’t want to be in a position where we made a commitment to an ongoing expenditure before we determined if we want to continue to invest in this,” Van Gytenbeek said.

The first assessments of the students’ progress will come at the end of Fifth Block, but the real test will come a year from now when next year’s CSAP results come in.

“If we find that it’s effective, we’ll do our best to replicate it. That will mean long-term building a budget that will support a program like this,” Van Gytenbeek said. “It is very expensive and we’ll have to be creative in what we do and what we don’t do. We build a calendar so we could do this in 2008 and 2009, but we’ll look at this in the fall in order to decide about repeating it in 2009.”

Initial feedback from teachers and parents is positive, he said. “They’ve told me about the successes they’re already seeing.”

In Stephanie Cave’s third-grade writing class at Crawford, that success is being measured in little things. Things like telling details in student-written stories.

“We’re working on writing about small moments,” said Cave, who will teach first grade there in the fall. “I’m teaching them to take a piece of their day and turn it into a story. By the end of the session, I expect them to be able to add more detail to their stories. To ‘show’ me, not to ‘tell’ me. I have one girl who wrote about being sad because she didn’t get to go out to dinner. And I asked her to expand on that. So on her revision, she wrote about how her head hung low because she didn’t get to go to Country Buffet. That’s what I mean.”

The first week of the program, the Crawford children didn’t seem to mind sacrificing so much of their summer break to remain in school.

“It was my decision to come,” said 10-year-old Ashley Chavez, who will be in the fifth grade come fall. “My mom goes to work every day, and I didn’t want to just stay home and be bored. If I weren’t here, I’d just be watching TV.”

Nine-year-old Mayra Valdez, another rising fifth-grader, agreed that boredom is her summer companion. “I don’t want to just be in my house all day,” she said. “By coming to school, I’ll get better at some more stuff than I am right now.”

Additional information

Fifth Block is one of a number of strategies Aurora Public Schools is implementing in an effort to increase student achievement and to narrow the so-called “achievement gap” that finds far fewer African American and Latino students attaining academic proficiency than do white and Asian students, and far fewer economically disadvantaged students achieving proficiency than those from wealthier homes.

The charts below list the percentages of students scoring proficient or advanced on CSAP reading and math tests.

READING

MATH

Source: Aurora Public Schools Community Report 2008          

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