CITY COUNCIL Mr. Clark Tenney

When summer comes around, all school employees go on vacation, right? Not exactly! It is true that since most of our 4,000 students have the summer off, the majority of our teachers are not teaching their regular classes for 9 weeks. So what happens in our schools over the summer?

Many teachers don’t stop working when summer arrives. Many of our special education students qualify for an “Extended School Year,” and their teachers and support staff lead those learning efforts. Also, a number of our teachers and other staff will spend the month of June supporting nearly 300 students in our robust Prescott Unified School District Summer School programs. Each of these summer programs help students extend their learning, and they offer remediation opportunities for students who can benefit from this.

Because teachers often work 50 to 60 hours each week during the school year, summer is their best time to take continuing education courses at conferences and through local universities. Many teachers spend their summers working towards additional degrees, certificates, or endorsements to refine their craft. Summer is prime time for teachers’ professional development!

Our school leaders are also hard at work all summer. They work together to analyze each school’s standardized test scores and other data and have deep discussions about goals and action plans for the upcoming year to improve student learning even more. New curriculum and supplies often arrive over the summer, and this all needs to be distributed to nearly 200 classrooms on our 7 school campuses. Although PUSD enjoys very low staff turnover, summer is also our main season for hiring great new teachers and school leaders to replace those who have retired or moved on. New Teacher Orientation is also planned, prepared, and carried out each summer.

PUSD’s amazing support staff are also hard at work all summer. Our finance department works like crazy to wrap up the fiscal year for our $30,000,000 budget, our HR folks issue contracts to all of our new hires, our maintenance folks do needed repairs at each school site, and our custodial staff do deep cleaning at each school while the kids are away.

While you might not see our 4,000 students streaming in and out of their schools every day, our PUSD folks are definitely hard at work every summer. And yes, a few of them are even able to fit in a family vacation between all of this work.

Happy summer!

Clark Tenney PUSD Director of Human Resources and Special Programs Prescott City Councilman