Summer stories: 'From the Creek to the Peake'

The idea for our Summer Enrichment Program came from our School to Career Chair Nick Scalice and our English Department Chair Kat Stack when we heard there were some career and technical education funds available to support our students.

At Chesapeake High School, we have seen that students often have a hard transition from middle to high school as the workload, credit importance, and self-reliance all increase tremendously as students enter high school.

Our hope for this short camp was to get incoming Grade 9 students (and those rising to Grade 10 who may not have had the most successful high school start) to come together to get a better foundation on expectations, executive functioning, Chesapeake High offerings, and ways to make the most of their high school experience.

The camp ran from June 24-28 from 8 a.m. — 12 p.m. Students received breakfast and lunch each day and worked on various projects to not only help them with self-discovery and life-planning but also teamwork and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skills. We made spaghetti towers, penny boats, and ping pong ball tunnels. We worked our way through math escape rooms and identity maps.

We also had them do some interest inventories and explore careers using ONet Online and linked their interests to offerings at Chesapeake High. We encouraged the students to communicate with each other and present ideas aloud. It was really a great week.

We had a combination of teachers from Chesapeake High and Deep Creek Middle School working at the camp and that is a connection I can see growing in the future as we strengthen our bond with our feeders. I think the older kids really enjoyed seeing some of their old teachers and the incoming Grade 9 students were comforted to not just be with “strangers.”

The combination of students was also great as they could field questions for each other and also reflect on what to do better next year. Overall, we had 14 students attend the program, and we really hope we can continue and grow it next year. I think it was really beneficial to those who attended.

Sarah Miller is a school counselor at Chesapeake High School.

This article is part of an occasional series about what BCPS students and staff are doing this summer — Summer Stories 2024. Want to suggest a story idea? Send it to communications@bcps.org.