People often comment to school staff about how quiet their summers must be. While summer brings a much different schedule around our sites, it is anything but quiet at the schools, especially this summer.

In addition to the regular summer cleaning and preparations, we’ve been busy already this summer getting our early childhood, second grade, and West Side rooms packed up and ready to move to their new locations for next fall.

The Early Childhood rooms at Park Side are being transformed for our new Early Childhood center. It will be great to have all that programming in one location next year. As you drive by the new Southview Elementary, you’ll notice a lot of work taking place outside over the past few weeks. We are looking at mid-July for completion and starting to move into that building, and have an open house planned for Aug. 20.

That site is a gift from our stakeholders that will be well-used for many years to come, and we can’t wait to show it to the community.

This past week you may have also noticed a large pile of dirt being hauled into the old swimming pool area at the Middle School. We have been able to fill that area in this summer as a first step to creating a multi-purpose space that will bring that space back to usable learning space for the schools and community in the near future.

Of course, in addition to the many maintenance projects taking place, we have summer learning programs in full swing as well. Our Targeted Services programs offer academic support to students in grades K-8, we have a credit recovery program at the high school, and are hosting summer college in the schools classes for Marshall and Southwest Collaborative juniors and seniors as well.

We are hoping all our students, families, and staff are enjoying a break this summer from the regular school routines and are finding time to relax and rejuvenate.

We’re excited to be planning for the 2021-22 school year and have everyone back to a school year that we anticipate will be much more “normal” than we had last year.

— Jeremy Williams is superintendent of Marshall Public Schools District