Despite a lower-than-hoped for enrollment level,summer school program at Ridgewood High School gets high marks
Monday July 16, 2012, 12:16 PM
BY LAURA HERZOG
STAFF WRITER
The Ridgewood News
Despite a lower-than-hoped for enrollment level, the revived summer school program at Ridgewood High School (RHS) has received a positive response from several participating students and their parents.
More than 100 students, about half of whom are from Ridgewood, enrolled in the program, which began June 25 and runs through July 27. According to Superintendent Daniel Fishbein, the two-year hiatus was brought on primarily for financial reasons.
According to Fishbein, the summer school program was brought back this year because last year the state changed a law that said districts could not charge their own students for summer courses.
“We could charge students from other districts, but we couldn’t charge our own students,” he said. “Because they still had to pay staff … we operated at a loss.”
https://www.northjersey.com/news/162596396_Revived_summer_school_is_in_session_in_Ridgewood.html
The summer school “rules” were never clearly presented. I knew that they had summer school but the hours per day for remedial and new credit were not clear. A borderline D/F student had 24 hours to get registered if they failed the class at the final exam.
I researched summer school programs at other schools in New Jersey in an attempt to figure out how Ridgewood probably worked. There was a school that had summer school for less weeks and an hour more per day. This would be much more attractive to a family that had to make summer plans around a student in school.
They should have had the marketing club get the information out to the students. No one wants to go to summer school and it is targeted to students who did not do well the first time. Don’t make it like a punishment.
I forgot to add this. It would have been good to know what teachers would be in the classroom for summer school. My son had a terrible English teacher this year and there was no way we would send him to summer school with her. She should be editing bool jackets in a cubicle somewhere away from children.