Surge in summer school enrollment after poor end-of-year test scores

Lee County is looking at a surge in summer school enrollments after the pandemic’s impact on end-of-year test scores.

After a year of learning during a pandemic, most parents weren’t surprised to learn that Florida Statewide Assessment test scores dropped this year. In English and language arts,
Lee County’s third grade scores went down eight points

There are roughly 25,000 students enrolled in summer programs in Lee County alone. With the district offering such a wide variety of summer programs, you can tell it’s a community effort to get these students back up to speed. There are over 1,600 third graders in the district’s expanded virtual learning summer program, one that is specifically designed to detect any students struggling and allow for the teacher to intervene with a personal Zoom session to help catch them up.

“I know that people think that it’s summer and so schools are closed and teachers are enjoying their day,” said Bethany Quisenberry, director of curriculum for the School District of Lee County. “But that is very much not the case. Our principals are already working hard on ensuring that we have all the resources that we need, and that we’re building our plan to be able to provide those interventions or enrichment for our students to meet all of their needs.”

Lee County says it plans to keep providing this kind of intervention well into the new school year.