Daniel Guerrero

It’s the first day of summer vacation after graduating from your recent middle school which you attended for the past three years. The sun is shining, the sound of waves go back and forth on the beach, the smell of the food being grilled on the grill, and the fireworks being pop right above you on a faithful holiday in America. However, instead of having those two perfect and relaxing months for students before starting their first day of high school, they would need to attend school a bit early. This problem only goes for the students who applied and accepted to the largest charter school in the nation, Granada Hills Charter High School (GHC).

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This summer school that GHC is being held for incoming students is called Summer Transition Academy (STA). This year, STA starts July 1-19, 2019 for these students which are about 3 weeks in total. According to the GHC’s handbook, STA allows students to complete Fall registration, be aware of where everything that is on campus and meeting new students in their classrooms. This is, in fact, true about the program in general, but should not be a graduation requirement at all due to being a waste of their time during summer vacation while being able to only miss one day of the program.

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The bad part of these students attending STA is that they will be missing their vacation plan with their families. GHC needs to understand that these students will be entering high school where most of their time will mostly be spent on education than with their families. Some are even affected by this where some had to cut their vacation short due to the program

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 Also, high school is considered as one of the most stressful years for students where they focus on working on assignments from their classes, studying for tests, doing SAT prep, extracurricular activities, college applications in their senior year etc. According to Real Simple, they included a study from New York University, where at least 48 percent of students receive three hours of homework each night during the week.

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Therefore, GHC should reflect on this study where they need to realize that family always come first at all time especially during that time of the students developing an adolescent. GHC is having these students to grow up really fast really early in the summer where they are only learning how to use their Chromebooks in their classes.

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During student’s math classes, they learn more about the functionality of their Chromebooks. Now in days, students are beginning to become more useful and adaptive to technology as it gets more advanced over time. Therefore, this is extremely unnecessary for these students to take where they are able to explore for themselves in their free time.

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Besides them exploring these functions on their Chromebook, the math class that they have for 2 hours, do not even learn math like mention earlier. In addition, this does not make any sense to call it a math class because students are in different math courses where some are in Algebra I or even in Geometry. Therefore, the math teacher can not teach these students the same material to all students in the classroom due to this reason. Even some thought that it was odd for GHC to call it a math class where it did had a significant purpose to it at all.

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In an exception to their math class, students would also need to go to their English right before or after their math classes, depending on the student’s schedule. Students do in fact learn the material on how to properly learn how to cite evidence from the text while having to analysis it and connecting it to their thesis statement.

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However, they would relearn this material again whenever they begin to write an essay for their English classes within the first weeks of school. Students who did not attend STA, they did not have any problem with figuring out this material where they ask other students in the classroom as well as their English teacher.

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 Therefore, GHC needs to at least to take this as a consideration where students are able to learn this material during the fall semester without having them to constantly learn it during the summer for three weeks.

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 That being so, GHC should at least make STA shorter where instead have students to attend the program for a week than three. In addition, they should also have cut the hours that the students attend at least by half. Instead, they would only to need to attend each block period they have for at least an hour than two. The reasoning behind the school constructing this type of change is the program is longer than it needs to be in general.

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 To further explain this, STA is longer than it needs to be where by the end of the first week of the program, the student would be able to the full material from both of their classes. Therefore, this leaves some time for students to take a break for about 4-5 weeks in their summer vacation while having the material to be refreshed from their head in the first weeks of school.

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Although GHC may argue that the students are able to make friends while having to share out their ideas with one another on assignments, some students to this today do not even keep in touch with them at all.

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Also, GHC claims that one of the purposes of STA is to have students know the campus beforehand. This can often be agreeable from a parent’s perspective, but can easily attend to 8th-grade Open House that GHC usually holds for these incoming students.  8th Open house is similar to SAT, but without having them In fact, GHC posted a map of the campus itself on their website which further allows them to know where everything is without having them to go to the program.

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That being in the case, students need to construct a petition to GHC that they should stop STA from going in order to have students save their vacation from doing unnecessary work. Not only that, students would not be stress over STA when applying to the school in general.

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