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Summer School Becomes Cool
charlottesville, education, enrichment program, odyssey 2025, schools, summer program,
The idea of learning during the lazy days of summer has become much better received by some students in Charlottesville, thanks to Odyssey 2025.
The program, which began in June 2008, ran for two weeks and offered rising sixth and seventh graders the chance to study meteorology and ecology. The overall goal of the program is to promote science as a field of study by providing unique, hands-on learning environments, says Jessica Kalagher, coordinator of science for the Charlottesville City Schools.
“It’s a summer camp setting, but the bigger picture is that it’s a new and novel professional development model for teachers,” Kalagher says. “It’s a way for teachers to learn something new and try it out with kids to see what works and what doesn’t, and then they can actually use these lessons throughout the year with all their kids, not just the select group who get to attend the summer program.”
Odyssey 2025 resulted from a collaboration between the Charlottesville and Albemarle County school systems and many other community partners, including the Public Education Fund of Charlottesville-Albemarle and the JASON Project, a subsidiary of the National Geographic Society that promotes science education through curriculum development and teacher education.
Local companies got on board with underwriting expenses, and by the time scientist and explorer Robert Ballard, who leads the JASON Project, visited Charlottesville in fall 2007 to kick things off, plans were well under way.
“The school superintendents had an idea about having some kind of science summer camp, but they hadn’t developed it very far,” Kalagher says. “They went to the Public Education Fund and began talking to them about raising money to support this idea without knowing what it would be, and then the PEF got [Ballard] to come and do a big fundraiser. After that, Chuck Pace, my counterpart in the county system, and I got involved, and we all began to make this happen.”
Over the course of the camp, sixth-grade students took part in “Operation: Monster Storms,” which taught them about major storms and the technology used to forecast weather. Seventh-grade students participated in “Operation: Resilient Planet,” which involved fieldwork and other methods to explore the immediate environment and learn how to protect local and global ecosystems.
As a part of the program, both groups heard from NASA hurricane tracker Michael Black, who told of the agency’s efforts to track hurricanes and other major events. Each class also made video recordings for local broadcast stations and for use by the JASON Project.
“So many people stepped up to make it happen, and it was just fantastic,” Kalagher says. “Now we are looking at adding an additional JASON Project curriculum so that we can have three concurrent programs. We have some teachers coming back to either do a different program or become a leader in the one they took last year.”
The student and teacher interest has been overwhelming, as has been the community support, so this kind of growth shouldn’t be hard to support.
“The partnerships we’ve had have been great,” Kalagher says. “It was quite expensive to get off the ground, but we were able to do not only that, but also to get some traction for other funding sources for the second and what we hope will be subsequent years.”
Story by Joe Morris
