Summer School.  It’s 110* outside, and sometimes it feels that way inside as well.  All your friends are sleeping in, hanging with friends, and lounging on a beach in Cali or Mexico, while summer school students are doing the opposite.  The summer program is offered by TUSD so students can either make up a credit they didn’t earn or get ahead in credits in order to not take the class during the school year or to graduate early, for acceleration purposes.

Most of the time people are required to take summer school for a class that they failed. This credit earning is called “Credit Recovery” and there are two ways you can take it. One way to take it is inside a classroom with a teacher where the teacher guides everyone. Another way is to take it online, but a teacher is available for questions, but does not teach; this one is self-paced. Credit Recovery costs $50 and you would take however many semesters you failed of a class. In acceleration courses, an online class is provided by the program Agave. This online class cost $75 per semester or session.

Summer school is broken up into two 12-day semesters, which lasts about one month. The first session during our last summer was from May 30th to June 13th and the second session was from June 14 to June 28th.  Alyssa Urff, a junior at Sahuaro who did acceleration said, “I finished a 2-week program in two and a half days by doing online classes and working really hard to get it done fast.” This just shows how serious you can take these summer classes and also how fast you can take them.

If you are an 8th grader coming into high school as a freshman, another way that you can earn a credit is in Freshman Academy, a program where freshmen can learn about the school or what high school is like, such as study and test skills, or about our environment. If freshmen complete this program, they can earn 1/4 of a high school credit, which can look good on your high school transcript.

TUSD does not provide transportation, but they do provide meals that were breakfast and lunch. The kids would get three breaks during the day; one in the morning for 15 minutes, one for lunch that was 30 minutes (11:30 to 12:00). The final break was in the afternoon which was also 15 minutes.