Summer for Learning

In Shorewood, Wis. last week, 40% of the town's 2,400 schoolchildren--from kindergarten to twelfth grade--were in classrooms instead of on vacation. Said one delighted teacher: "Our kids use summer for learning--and have fun at the same time."

The same idea has suddenly cropped up across the nation: an estimated 50% of all urban school districts in the U.S.now operate summer schools. One-fourth of Los Angeles' 200,000 secondary school youngsters are studying this summer, more than twice as many as five years ago.

One-third of Chicago's high schoolers are doing the same, a fourfold rise since 1955. In some Northeast suburbs, considerably more than half of all teen-agers are in summer school. Everywhere, the trend is from makeup work to advanced courses, often given without credit. P:At Denver's East High School, a chemistry student does a year's work in eight weeks, and grades are issued every Monday morning. Three consecutive failures mean dismissal, but only twelve students out of 1,629 have failed. Denver is so satisfied with such performance that it may well go into an eleven-month year for all high school students. P:At Newton (Mass.) High School, 164 teen-agers from ten towns around Boston tackle a six-week summer telescoping of a full year's work in one subject, from biology to history. Another 710 children are in summer elementary and junior high school classes. Courses are taught by "master teachers" recruited from across the U.S. by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Chief aim: to train ap prentice teachers. Students are no problem; Newton's summer program has twice as many applicants as places. P:At North Haven (Conn.) High School, Yale has another teacher-training session, and 402 students from 59 schools are the beneficiaries. They get no credit, but after Yale's master teachers get through with them, colleges are unlikely to ig nore their experience.

Who's Bored? One significant trend is an effort to give youngsters an early taste of many fields so that later they can channel themselves more effectively. Most of the effort is still at the high school level. An ambitious plan to do the job even earlier is a pilot project at Darien (Conn.) High School called Sciences and Arts Camps Inc. SAAC's goal: to launch a chain of brain-stirring summer day camps for gifted fourth-to sixth-graders in suburbs across the country.

Incorporated by some top U.S. executives, such as RCA President John Burns, SAAC's first camp has 225 youngsters studying Russian, science, math, logic, writing, politics, art and music under 14 expert teachers and 20 junior counselors. (Tuition for six weeks: $195.) If some parents were at first appalled at the agenda, they have changed their minds. Asked one mother last week: "What have you done with my child? He was absolutely exhausted when he got home, and then he spent two hours telling us what he did today. Whatever happened to summer boredom?"

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