A new summer school program meant to help students get back on track for lost instruction time during the pandemic encountered obstacles on its first day Monday. 

Absenteeism and the inability to conduct online testing were two issues.

“We had almost 750 signed up,” said Director of Schools Grant Swallows. “We don’t know how many of those actually showed up. They got a week off in between and getting them back is going to be a little bit more of a challenge than we anticipated.”

Approximately 50 students were no-shows.

Swallows provided an update to members of the county Education Committee on Monday evening.

Bus driver confusion may have added to absenteeism.

“We were able to offer bus transportation,” said Swallows. “We had some bumps with that as well. It’s not everyone’s normal bus route. We received some inquires of ‘When’s the bus coming?’ We’ll get all that ironed out. It was just the first day today. We need to make sure we get everyone picked up.”

The Tennessee Legislature has provided money to start a new six-week program for elementary schools and a four-week program for middle schools through the Tennessee Learning Loss Remediation and Student Acceleration Act.

“We’ve actually included the high school,” said Swallows. “The high school decided in the last couple weeks that they wanted to offer one, so we are using some of our federal money for that. We’ve got a little more than 100 students signed up to be part of that program. Again, that was invitation only and for students who were behind and, potentially, didn’t get all the credits they ended to get.”

Offering summer school programs at each school makes Warren County Schools unique.

“I think we are the only school in the Upper Cumberland that has one at every school,” said Swallows. “Most other systems are just centrally locating their summer school program. We are trying our best to serve everyone as best we can.” 

The program also had an issue with online testing, a benchmark exam meant to be used at the beginning of the program and at its end to determine if educational advancements have been made. Swallows says the online testing effort failed and teachers went old school.

“As you understand, with any new program, there were things that we were told would be made available to us, but they are still in the works. For instance, every student should have received a pre-test and a post-test that they are supposed to take when they enter this program and finish this program. As of last week, they had not populated all the names into the testing database yet. We ended up printing out the tests and we did them by paper.”

Swallows assured members of the county Education Committee that the issues would be addressed and that the goal remains unchanged, “Our goal is that students make up for some lost instruction time. Hopefully, offer an experience in which students can have a little fun while they work on some skills to help them be successful in their next grade level and moving forward,” he said.