During the summer months, students who did not quite make the grade during the school year, had an inadequate amount of high performance or effort in their studies or needed to catch up on credits they did not receive often attend summer school.

The entire purpose of this educational exercise is to keep students on the path to graduation, and this mandate is taken very seriously by the employees of Demopolis High School.

As principal of DHS, Leon Clark is responsible for his students 365 days a year, and this includes the summer months.

Clark is highly knowledgeable on the inner workings of the summer school system and believes that, even though the amount of attention and work provided to students attending summer school is not always enough to bring them to their greatest potential, he also adamantly feels that it can and will be improved.

In his many long years as principal for various schools, Clark sees that summer school has “more or less stayed the same for the past 10 to 15 years.”

This is something he has every intention of changing, particularly by implementing new programs during the regular school year to lessen and perhaps even remove the need for summer school courses.

The leading contender for this is an after-school program referred to as “Credit Recovery,” in which students that meet certain requirements, have certain grade-point averages and are in certain circumstances will be able to retake a course or a section of a course they failed the previous semester and then retest, bringing up their overall grade.

This program is not only intended to bring up grades but also to increase the graduation rate and improve students’ desire to do better in school.

For the roughly 55 students enrolled in summer school this year at DHS, this new program and others like it could be exceptionally good news and may mean more fun and more freedom for them next summer.