Costa summer school reforms would benefit the district, students

By Courtney Hughey
Staff Writer

To improve Mira Costa’s summer school programs, Mira Costa Vice Principal Jamie Mancilla and Kathy Duffy, director of the Manhattan Beach Extracurricular Foundation, or MBX, have recommended a number of reforms including separate online registration dates for popular courses. Yet, more drastic changes such as a more expansive course offering are needed to fix program issues for both the district and students.
For years, Costa has used only the MBX website for summer school sign-ups since all summer school revenue goes to Mira Costa athletic programs. This year, however, Mancilla and other administrators were forced to put summer school applicants into a lotteryto be accepted due to technical difficulties with the site. According to MBX President Gary Wayland, the website crashed because over 4,000 people tried to access it at the same time.

For this summer, only three American government classes are available, meaning that over 50 students who wanted to enroll in the class were unable to. With a large amount of students wanting to be in commonly requested classes like American government or U.S history, Mancilla and the summer school staff must adapt to these demands by making more sections available. This can be done by hiring more teachers to teach summer school.

The hiring of more teachers for the program is a valuable summer school expenditure because summer school adds flexibility to a student’s schedule. Not only does it allow students to make up missed or failed courses, but summer school also allows them to accelerate their schedules and take more appealing classes during the school year.

Offering more classes for the subjects with the highest demand would help students and bring in more revenue for MBX. This would benefit Costa athletic programs, aid in purchasing instruments, and improve athletic facilities and equipment.

Mancilla and Duffy recognize that changes need to be made, but only those necessary to ease the process of summer school registration. Instead of forcing students to attend other schools, keeping what many Mira Costa students that sign up at their own school by enacting classroom and registration changes would help avoid discrepancies with other school curriculums or credits.

Costa Principal Dr. Ben Dale, and other administrators want MBX to limit summer school enrollment to not drastically impact regular school scheduling. While this is reasonable, according to Mancilla, many students who don’t get into summer school at Mira Costa take classes at other schools, limiting MBX revenue and inconveniencing students while failing to ameliorate the school year scheduling problem.
Creating more availability for highly requested classes would meet demands of the students, benefit athletics, and make scheduling a less problematic issue.