By Catelyn Dileva
Staff Writer
Mira Costa students take summer school to either eliminate classes from their schedule or to get ahead in a subject. While it helps some students manage their class schedule, some might not be learning the material as well as they should be due to the condensed time period. In addition, this year, the process to get in caused unnecessary stress for the student body.
Costa offers multiple summer school classes, ranging from three to six weeks during the summer, to all grade levels. There are around 17 different courses as well as sport activities offered throughout the first half of summer break
Students feel forced to sign up for summer courses so they can fit more classes into their schedule. This isn’t always the better decision because students often aren’t absorbing the material taught and instead overwhelm themselves with fast paced and challenging classes.
As said by Vice Principal Ian Drummond, the decision to take summer school is based off of the students academic needs, like finishing a class or taking a credit needed to graduate. Summer school is designed to reduce classes and stress from students schedules and during the summer students only have one class and possibly a sport.
Summer school might not be effective and the material might not be absorbed while students gain the same knowledge. The difference is caused if they were to take the class in a year rather than six weeks.
According to Drummond, the difference between a class during summer and class during the year is the amount of time students have to focus on that class. During the summer, students have few nights to learn their material, when in the school year, students have weeks to learn the same amount of material. Even though a student has little time to prepare for class each night it helps students decrease their stress in the future.
The process of choosing which students are chosen to take summer class are through a lottery before summer. The lottery is held by MBUSD and students are chosen randomly for the desired class they want to take. This causes stressed and worried students because they cannot control if they will be in summer school. This can be controversial due to the change. Most students sign up for summer school so they can eliminate classes they have to take and students might feel like they cannot do anything to handle that situation if the chance to get in is a lottery.
Summer school is opened up to any student that would like to take a class if they have met certain prerequisites, but they are allowed to sign up for whichever class they need. Many different subjects are offered during summer school which helps get more kids to take the classes they need to finish a credit, but there are not enough classes for the amount of students wanting to take summer school at Costa.
If summer school was not offered at Costa, students would have to pick which classes they wanted to do the most, and which ones were most beneficial to them. Some students would argue and think it isn’t fair to not offer summer school classes because great amounts of stress on the students and unrealistic schedules would become conflicting.
Even though summer school can be beneficial to reduce classes for the upcoming year, a great amount of stress is put on a student to either get into a class and to take a class.
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