Some 1,800 students from schools across Monongalia County start going downhill today – so they’ll be better able to hit new learning elevations, come fall.
Today is the first day of “Summer Avalanche,” the learning enrichment program created three years ago to help students regain footholds – after the classroom losses wrought by the pandemic.
The program runs through July 27 at all Mon County schools, and course offerings, district officials said, couldn’t be more eclectic.
Said courses are tailored for newcomers entering kindergarten and old-hand seniors getting ready to graduate.
For the local district, the Avalanche was a happy byproduct of COVID-19.
In 2021, Mon’s district was presented with a $1.4 million in supplemental funding from the federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief Fund, or ESSERF, as it is known.
The district, still smarting from 15 months of remote learning wrought by the pandemic, immediately funneled its ESSERF outlay into summer programming.
Mon Schools employed a bit of wordplay when it named the program, Deputy Schools Superintendent Donna Talerico said.
In fact, she said, it’s a misnomer, of sorts: on purpose.
That’s because in the physical world, an avalanche is a chaotic event that can be dangerous, with rocks and boulders crashing down.
If it happens on a snow-covered mountain, snow begets more snow, which keeps building and layering – as the whole enterprise finally expends its energy.
Mon’s Avalanche, she said, is designed to stack up positive layers of learning, which students will carry into fall, as they begin crest new academic plateaus in the new year.
This year’s offerings include “Ready, Freddie,” designed to get incoming kindergarteners acclimated to the school environment.
Middle-school students will learn how science, technology, engineering and math can be applied to the undersea world in the Avalanche’s Aquatic STEM Camp at the Mylan Park Aquatic Center.
Students can dive into learning a new language: Mini-immersive camps in Spanish, Italian and Russian are also on the bill – along with primers of the programming of Artificial Intelligence, a language everyone is getting to know.
Look for fun side trips on film studies and practical ventures on how to prepare for the ACT and SAT tests, also.
Nationally, such learning ventures in the summer, do yield positive results, according to studies by the Rand Corporation and other entities.
And school systems across the country are still trying to regain their pre-pandemic legs.
Meanwhile, the Avalanche falls near and dear to the heart of Susan Taylor, a former classroom teacher and reading specialist who coordinates summer programming for Mon Schools.
In the case of the signature event, “summer,” she said, is a bit of a misnomer, too.
“We start planning for the Avalanche in February,” she said. “It’s basically one big calendar year for us.”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
