By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph School District officials hope to bring back a popular summer school program.
Superintendent Gabe Edgar says he has completed contract negotiations with Catapult Learning to bring back the program which incentivizes student attendance.
Edgar says the experience working with Catapult over the last two years has been a positive one.
"It's been a good experience, it was a good experience for our kids, and a lot of them need that remediation time," Edgar tells KFEQ Hotline host Barry Birr. "And they do a parent survey and a staff survey and one thing that I can tell you from the first year to the second year it was very, very well received from the staff and parent side, the parents are really supportive of what's going on."
The St. Joseph School Board is set to consider the contract in its meeting later this month.
Edgar says the program helps cut down on the amount of catch-up time that students usually go through in September.
"I think it fills that gap and obviously the last couple of years with the challenges that we had just keeping kids in school from a COVID standpoint that gap has grown, Edgar says. "And so, this is just a piece to try to put that back together."
Edgar says the program is offered to about 4-thousand students in the district and incentivizes attendance by giving students 100 dollars for perfect attendance throughout the program.
And that's not the only good news coming out of the St. Joseph School District according to Edgar
After four years of regression St. Joseph School District officials are seeing a growth in the number of enrolled students.
Edgar says the district has seen an increase of 27 students enrolled this school year.
Edgar says while 27 may not seem like a big number, it's a step in the right direction after constant regression over his five years in the district.
"And then we declined 186 kids to 2019, declined another 267 to 2020, declined another 166 to 2021, and then now we're up 27 students," Edgar says. "So, if you look at that trend, you know, we were an average of 200 kids going backwards."
Edgar says he's not certain what has attributed to the rise in enrollment, but is hopeful the number of students will continue to rise.