Students eager for school days

Summer prep program a hit

The room was steamy, the hour early, the paint fumes pungent. But for 17 young hobbits, the setting for that day's "Moving to the High School" session was under a mountain in Middle Earth.

English teacher Bill McCarthy swung an umbrella to mimic a sword. On the wall hung maps, a "Hobbit" chapter summary, and the six defining features of an epic.

It is hard enough to get kids to go to school when it is required. How do you get them to come when it is not?

To the surprise of teachers, a voluntary Somerville High School program is attracting incoming ninth graders on hot summer mornings - drawn by the promise of looking cool on that crucial first day.

"They keep showing up!" said coordinator/Tufts graduate student Polly Donovan.

"I think it's pretty incredible," said teacher Sabrina Trinca.

Daily attendance averaged 41 students during the first three-week session, said school spokeswoman Gretchen Kinder; some returned for the second - added by popular demand - which ends on Thursday.

They are not typical apple-polishers, either. Organizers reached out to students with academic problems, Kinder said.

She chalked the success up to the work administrators did to revamp the program. Last year, 50 students enrolled, but only 16 stuck it out to the end. The program is funded by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

"The overall goal is to help students understand the culture for high school," Kinder said.

Four mornings a week, participants take an academic class - math the first session, English the second - and play games to learn their way around the school.

"They do a lot of scavenger hunts" to familiarize themselves with the school layout, Donovan said, and "locker relays trying to open their lockers."

Outside the building, they venture to places such as Bunker Hill Community College and the Museum of Science - the former trip craftily designed to show students why they should muscle through high school and go to college. Mentors in the culinary arts program made chocolate with the teens, and nursing students taught them how to take a pulse.

So what has kept the students coming back?

Social pressures weighed heavily on many. Some students' entire elementary/middle schools were smaller than the entering freshman class.

"I imagined myself walking, looking for a class, ending up in some senior class [with] boys with beards," said Kimberly Joseph, 14, who went to the Arthur D. Healey pre-K-8 school. They would think, " 'Oh yeah, she's a freshman.' "

Now she thinks her first day of high school will "probably go OK."

But academics also proved a draw.

"I really stink at English, so I thought that it would, like, help me," said Matt Estey, 14, who fought sleepiness to attend. ("You get home and you say I want to go to bed, but you never go to bed," he said.) He pulled out a yellow worksheet and explained to a reporter how high school grading works.

If the session works out the way officials intend, the students will agree with Joseph's assessment: "School can be fun sometimes."

It probably helps that "they don't have to take any quizzes or tests," Trinca said. The second session guides students to prepare a summer book project the high school requires. However, "it's not academically intensive. We never talk about MCAS," Donovan said.

With that in mind, the criteria for success and evaluation are not MCAS scores, but attendance, student satisfaction, and students' recall of what they learned six to nine months later, Kinder said.

McCarthy, on loan from Arlington High, praised his charges. "I think that they really are doing well," he said. "They seem like a great group of kids who really want to try."

In his experience, "I know a lot of kids that come from eighth to ninth grade, and they just drown."

"A lot of these students are very shy, very quiet," Donovan said. "They're becoming a lot more confident . . . now they sort of walk around like they own the place."

Maybe a little too much; painters have complained that the students are entering forbidden areas and getting in their way.