Mahomet-Seymour moves summer school to e-learning, cancels P.E.

After receiving guidance from the Illinois State Board of Education and the phase standards administered by Gov. JB Pritzker earlier this week, Illinois High Schools, will move from an in-person summer school model to an e-learning model. 

Mahomet-Seymour HIgh School announced this week that it will move to an e-learning model for summer school classes.

In guidance issued by the Illinois State Board of Education and Julie Pryde, the Public Health Administrator for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health Department, Mahomet-Seymour will continue to offer speech and the book portion of driver’s education in the summer of 2020, but will have to drop the summer P.E. offering. 

“As with all of our decisions related to the COVID-19 Pandemic the safety and wellbeing of our students were at the forefront of our decision making process,” Mahomet-Seymour’s Assistant Principal Patrick Bailey said. 

Summer e-learning will look different from remote learning that students have become accustomed to over the course of the last eight weeks in that daily attendance will be taken, the student will be required to participate in the class and grades that count toward GPA will be administered.

Bailey said that Mahomet-Seymour is in a great position to move to the e-learning format with their 1-to-1 initiative that provides each high school student with a Chromebook. 

“We will continue to use Chromebooks and Google Classroom to facilitate our classes and offer wireless hotspots to our students who have connectivity issues,” he said.

With new students coming into new classes with new teachers, Bailey said that it will be a challenge to students and teachers to find that connection that they would face-to-face, though.

“Our Summer School teachers will have required times for students to be virtually present in class, but it is much more difficult to build the culture that our MSHS teachers excel at,” Bailey said. “I’m sure they are coming up with creative ways to overcome this challenge, however! I can’t wait to hear about what they do.”

Parents have the opportunity to get a refund on the course if they do not want their child to participate through the online platform.

Decisions about summer programming, including summer camps and extracurricular activities at the high school have yet to be made. 

“We are continuing to evaluate information and guidance from local and state governing bodies to assist us in those decisions,” Bailey said.