The article in the New York Times written by REBECCA CATHCART on May 30, 2009 said that the latest casualty of California’s widening budget gap is to “Cancels Most Summer Schools” LOS ANGELES school district is considering cutting down on summer schools programs and recreational activities. This will have a major impact on students, parents, teacher and community in general. Summer school is good for our students as it keep them busy and out of trouble throughout the holiday Many of the students also requires summer school for them to be able to catch up with their school work. The state of Los Angeles is saying that this summer, will be different from any other summer. Most of the summer classes and recreational activities will be canceled because they are trying to save money. It is good to save money, but are we doing it at the expense of our students? Many of these students will be rooming along the street, entering one problem or the other as they do not have any thing that is engaging them. Many of the students will be frustrated and this will lead to their getting associated with bad groups in the community.
Without the summer schools, students will have less opportunity to improve on their learning and this will have an adverse effect on students that need to catch up in their school work. “I think that we have not done a good job in this city of coming together as a community to look at how do we provide for our children and young people in the summer,” the superintendent said. “They are vulnerable to gangs, narcotics and mischief activities that lead to minor crime and some major crime.” In some cases when students are away from school, they are away from their learning and many of the students forget what they have learned during this period. When they come back to school teacher will do some extra work in helping them to catch up with the rest of the class. Any child that did not read over the summer is apt to forget or lose literacy skills, they develop significant lose after the summer , however, children that read over the summer always improve in their reading and do much better when schools starts after summer. Summer learning for our student is a very important contributor to the achievement gap. To prevent achievement lose our students need to go to summer school
Cancellation of most summer classes, activities and recreational programs will be hard on families leading “leaving many whose parents work at loose ends.” Parents will be looking for a place to keep their children and they will go out of their way to look for a nanny or private recreational classes for their children. This will affect their budget that is already tight because of situation in the economy
On the part of our educators many of them have sacrificed their pay increase; Cola in order to make sure that they keep their job. If there is no summer school many of the teachers that hope on using summer school to make up and still remain OK in this day of our economic woes will be drastically affected. Many of the teachers that use summer school to supplement their income will be without jobs “The decision also affects thousands of teachers. Many count on income from summer teaching jobs” and this will make many of them to go out and look for jobs, and as such some of them will get a better paying jobs causing them to give up their teaching position leading to the loss of some good teachers in the district. Also “come fall, teachers will have the added burden of helping students who did not get the academic instruction they needed over the summer to catch up.”
As students are at home during summer Holidays with nothing to keep them busy and no one to supervise them, they will join bad groups and this will increase the crime rate threatening the peace of the community. Many of them will be arrested and sent to correctional facility and the money the district think they are saving will be used in a different way and place .During this summer vacation many of the students will learn a lot of bad behavior that they will bring in to the school system.
The decision of Los Angeles district to cut down on summer school programs and recreational activities is a high risk that will affect many people. The best option is to keep the program and not to destroy the well being of the community, teachers, students and parent. They should look for another option.