Decatur schools: Summer camps only in elementary schools

Jun. 2—Almost one-third of Decatur City Schools students in kindergarten through third grade will attend monthlong summer learning camps that have narrowed their scope since last year to focus on those ages and students needing remediation.

"Last year, we opened (reading camps) for everybody," Superintendent Michael Douglas said. "This year, it's more targeted to those that were identified by state testing that needed to attend."

The camps begin Monday, and Douglas said they scheduled the camps to last most of June so students can have July off before school starts back Aug. 10.

The camps will be held in all of the system's elementary schools except for Chestnut Grove and Eastwood because of ongoing construction projects at those sites. Eastwood students will attend the camp at Walter Jackson Elementary, and Chestnut Grove students will attend Julian Harris Elementary.

Secondary schools in the district will not host summer camps. Last summer, the district had a session for K-5 students in June and one for grades 6-8 in July.

This year, students in kindergarten through third grade that need remediation will attend. Sessions will last from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and students will receive a free breakfast and lunch on those days.

Oak Park Elementary Assistant Principal Annie Diaz is the director of the reading camp at her school, known districtwide as the Summer Learning Academy, and said this year's camp will include math intervention as well.

"It's going to be four hours of reading instruction a day and one hour of math instruction," Diaz said. "We're really going to focus on the literacy needs of the students, so it's going to be an intense literacy instruction for four weeks."

The Literacy Act, passed in 2019, was established to make sure elementary students are reading at or above grade level by the time they reach the third grade. The law originally had a retention piece that would retain third graders until they reached reading proficiency.

Earlier this year, the Legislature and Gov. Kay Ivey delayed the retention piece until the 2023-2024 school year.

Diaz said the main purpose of the 16-day camp is to make sure students adjust to Literacy Act standards before they get to the third grade.

"We want to get these kids on grade level so we're going to work on phonics progression, we're going to work with their phonemic awareness and comprehension," Diaz said. "The goal is to see growth."

Wanda Davis, elementary curriculum supervisor for Decatur schools, is overseeing the Summer Learning Academy and said there are currently 852 students registered to take the camp and 15 on a waiting list. The district has approximately 2,700 students in grades K-3.

"We have 65 classroom teachers and we also have some resource teachers, such as special education, (English Language teachers), and we also have some interventionists," Davis said. "We'll have about 95 (in total) that will be working with the students."

Davis said the district started determining what students were eligible for the camp in February. She said students on the waiting list will be able to attend if students who registered do not show up.

Davis said the Summer Learning Academy will help students struggling in these areas: letter naming, phoneme segmentation (breaking words into individual sounds), knowledge of sight words, blending (decoding words), letter sounds, oral reading, and reading accuracy.

"The teachers will have whole-group lessons for the students and then they'll break off into small groups several times a day," Davis said. "For instance, they may teach for 20 minutes on a particular skill, then they'll break off into small groups and then they'll do more of that (teaching) depending on what the child needs."

Davis said there are 520 students out of the 852 who have signed up for busing to the camps.

— wesley.tomlinson@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2438.