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Hamblen County Superintendent of Schools Arnie Bunch discussed summer school in midst of the new Third Grade Retention Law.

The district received scores at the end of May and there was a lot of success seen in comparison to last year.

Hamblen County saw massive improvement in the scores from this year’s third graders versus their performance on the second grade level of the TCAP test last year.

However, approximately 59% of Hamblen County third graders fell into the Below Expectations or Approaching Expectations categories.

Bunch explained what the summer and the next school year will look like for those students who fall in those categories.

“For the rising fourth graders who scored in the below category they have to attend summer school and also receive intensive tutoring in the fall, for those in the approaching category if they attend summer school and at the end show adequate growth then they will not have intensive tutoring.”

The adequate growth the state expects is a 5% improvement on test scores.

Summer School has already started for Hamblen County students and Bunch discussed how it’s looking.

“We have 532 kids enrolled in summer school from rising kindergarten to rising ninth grade,” he said. “We had capacity for more students and we actually thought we would have more students in the rising fourth grade area enroll.

“We thought we would have around 400 rising fourth graders enrolled, but we actually only needed room to accommodate 184, and maybe not even that many, and we have 198 enrolled.”

He explained how many students retook the exam and how many submitted appeals.

“As we went through the process we ended up with a little over a 40.9% pass rate and then we had a large number of exemptions and then we had around 15 kids who retook the test and passed,” Bunch said.

“We had a number of appeals and with those we had 67 appeals processed so far. One of those was not actually eligible to appeal so that didn’t account, we had two who were previously successful so that doesn’t count and then we had one transfer out of the school system.

“We’re at 100% approval for those who were eligible and then we have around 13 who are waiting for their parents to submit an appeal.”

He said all students who need to attend summer school are currently enrolled and are actively participating.

“The ones we needed to attend summer school are in it,” he said.

Although it’s too early to tell if students will benefit from the summer schooling, Bunch notices that all students are attentive and actively learning.

“It’s too early to tell. I went to two of the Elementary Summer Schools the other day to see what was going on and they were all actively engaged and the teachers were doing a great job,” he said. “The students have a great learning environment and I’m proud of the way it was run and how we have it set up.”

Bunch wants to reassure the community that the district is working diligently to close all learning gaps in the schools.

“We are actively engaged in trying to close all the gaps from COVID,” he said. “It’s going to take us a little time. We have great administrators and teachers. We can close this learning gap and get a majority of our kids back on grade level.”