Beginning the 2021-2022 school year, the English Department has decided that they will indefinitely forever end summer reading for all students. 

“There are better practices of having students do independent reading rather than giving them a test from a book they read over the summer,” Mr. Thomas Barnes, English Department Chair said. “Some of the test results were very poor, so a lot of the kids were beginning the year with low grades.”

Since summer reading was also cancelled last year because of quarantine, it gave the department insight as to how cancelling it indefinitely would impact students’ learning. 

“Independent reading is still a standard, according to the state of Indiana,” Mr. Barnes said. “It is a skill that we still need to cover, so we need to find a more effective way of doing that. We are planning on a way to add in more independent reading to the English curriculum during the school year, but for now, what we know for sure is that summer reading is not happening anymore.”

Looking forward to the future, the department plans to make more changes regarding the material that is being read in classes.

“We are planning on getting new novels for the 2022-2023 school year,” Mr. Barnes said. “These will have more diverse authorship. The English teachers did a lot of reading and researching to find new books, but with complications from the pandemic, we weren’t able to get them for this year. When we do order these new books, we want to make some of them for independent reading to meet Indiana’s state standards.”