After the ending of the 2023-24 school year, Clark County School District (CCSD) will be experiencing a few changes in available programs and resources. Among them, summer enrichment, Paper, and Apex Learning will no longer be funded district wide.
Introduced as a result of quarantine and district learning, summer enrichment was a free program funded by federal COVID-relief, that aimed to help credit deficient students as well as transition students from social distancing back into regular school expectations. Enrichment extracurriculars were offered in tandem with summer school and credit retrieval.
English 10 teacher Nikki Dual said, “My understanding was that the summer enrichment programs were brought on to help kids to transition back into the expectations of the public school system after COVID. So it makes sense to me that the enrichment programs are no longer being funded.”
As with many cases of programs losing central funding, individual schools will have the option of using “available site-based funds” to fund enrichment activities. Las Vegas Academy (LVA) is not expected to continue summer enrichment.
Different from the case of being funded by grant-money, but still district-wide in availability, Paper is no longer being paid for all district-wide schools.
These programs need to be utilized in order to continue to be funded, and across the district, Paper has been met with jaded reception. Here at LVA, reception seems more negative.
Stacy Miller, LVA’s College Coordinator, said, “The students haven’t been super impressed with the feedback that they get. So I think it’s multi-level there, but I honestly don’t think they reach out as much. I believe a lot of it (advice received from Paper) was computer generated. That wasn’t super beneficial either.”
Aliyah Billings, junior multimedia major, said, “Paper is not a very good tool. I’ve used it before for classes. You either get a really crappy teacher who doesn’t help at all or someone who gives you all the answers, which kind of defeats the purpose of being a tutor.”
Ms. Dual said, “None of the English teachers at Las Vegas Academy of the Arts would have advocated to keep Paper. It was very substandard. It was not regularly useful. It was hit or miss whether or not students would get a tutor that actually was knowledgeable in the content area. So oftentimes, students would get bad advice or limited feedback from their tutors, and sometimes it did more harm than it did good.”
As a district-wide-funded program, Paper was a pushed resource to use across many schools in the district. Teachers and students alike did not appreciate the push to utilize Paper’s tutoring.
“If they did a better job of screening their tutors to ensure that their tutors knew how to properly utilize rubrics and give feedback according to rubrics. I think that it would have been a very useful tool,” said Dual, “At this point, we are very skill-based in the way in which we teach. Understanding how to help students to improve in very specific skills would be mandatory for any tutor… So a tutor giving feedback that’s very general might help that student to become a better writer, but not necessarily to achieve a very specific assessment.”
Finally, another program that seems to be losing central funding is Apex. A credit recovery program that was offered free in the summer, Apex seems to now rely on site-based funding, and as a result students may have to pay for specific over-the-summer courses.
“I saw somewhere else that Silverado was expected to have students pay $50 per Apex course and I think that’s probably going to be original credit, not credit retrieval. Credit retrieval; CCSD or at least LVA is still paying for,” said Miller.
A “paywall” of any kind is a barrier for student accessibility, but credit retrieval programs were previously paid out of pocket by parents. The return to having parents (or even students) pay for these classes may not be as negative as it first sounds.
“However, when I first started teaching about 10 years ago that was the way that it worked. Students had to pay, at least at the schools that I worked at. They had to pay I believe that was about $100 fee, every take,” said Dual. ”Most of the students I’ve ever worked with are capable of passing their classes. Students not passing classes are as a result of parents not prioritizing their students being in class on a daily basis. So prioritizing attendance and following up with their children to ensure that all of their work is being done on a regular basis. So in that case, parents having to pay $100 for their child to come and retake a class, I don’t think it’s too much of an expectation.”
While certain schools may start implementing fees for over-the-summer Apex courses, LVA does not seem to be implementing such things. Other credit retrieval programs like Nevada Learning Academy (NVLA) are still available and free to any full-time-enrolled CCSD student.
