Increasing summer school staffing levels and decreasing the summer school financial deficit are among the Wright City R-II district administration’s priorities for the program next year. 

Wright City R-II Superintendent Dr. Chris Berger and Assistant Superintendent Doug Smith presented the Board of Education last month with an update of the 2023 summer school program, while also looking at improvements to make for summer school for the 2024 school year. 

Overall, the 2023 summer school session ran a deficit of just over $103,000. This was the district’s highest summer school deficit since 2019. They ran a deficit of over $39,000 during the 2022 summer school session.

Berger said he would like to see the district reduce the deficit for summer school from about $100,000 down to about $50,000. 

“We need to get it back to whatever is tolerable,” Berger said. “And I’ll say off the cuff if you’re running a really good program, is $50,000 tolerable? I think so. Heavy interventions, absolutely. But that would probably be the target and what we need to do is we need to get ADA (Average Daily Attendance) up. We’ve gotta get more kids to summer school.”

Multiple Wright City R-II Board of Education members were not as concerned with the deficit of approximately $100,000. Board Secretary David Mikus said “that number doesn’t scare me.” Board Vice President Erin Williams is not concerned with the $103,000 deficit for its benefit for the community. 

Smith stressed one of the biggest challenges with their overall enrollment numbers in summer school in 2023 was not being able to staff summer school to take on a larger enrollment. This is despite the Board of Education approving an increase in summer school teacher pay. The district increased summer school staff pay by $3 per hour. Teachers made $30 per hour and aides made $17 per hour. The increase also applied to administrators. 

The enrollment for the 2023 summer school session was 527. The district’s summer school enrollment was 592 in 2022 and 546 in 2021. 

“Enrollments were capped in all three of those years because we couldn’t staff it,” Smith said. “And so I believe that we could likely get that student number back when we were around the 700 number if we had enough staffing to do so. We turned away quite a few people this year and had to put an enrollment deadline on. And after that deadline, we received lots of calls or requests for people wanting to be in it that we had to turn down.”

The district plans to continue to work to recruit additional staff. However, they paid staff during the 2023 summer school session significantly more than in the past. They also hired teachers outside of the district to teach summer school. They still did not have staff to meet enrollment demands. 

The district also intends to use Catapult Learning for the 2024 school year to determine whether curriculum revisions were beneficial. 

“I think we intend to use Catapult learning again for at least one more year to determine if their curriculum revisions are beneficial,” Smith said. “And we also get the eValuate test that you get the data on at the board reports monthly. And I mean, it’s just an included cost to summer school. If we were to just buy the eValuate test, apart from Catapult, that would be about a $30,000 purchase.”