Interim weeks have become a staple of alternative learning at The Gregory School, despite their ever-changing content. A new format for interim week, which will see its first use in the spring of 2020, hopes to put an emphasis on giving back to the community.
First introduced at The Gregory School at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year, interim week was started as a way for students to learn and grow in different ways outside of the traditional classroom setting. During interim weeks, students have traditionally embarked on week long trips with their classmates instead of attending their regular class schedule. A record of each trip is marked on a student’s transcript.
These trips often have an agenda that ties into a particular class or topic that each grade is focusing on. For example, juniors typically travel to Cedar City to watch the Utah Shakespeare festival, coinciding with their study of Shakespearian plays in English 3.
Despite efforts by TGS faculty to plan and execute engaging class trips, student surveys taken at the end of past interim weeks managed to display consistently negative feedback. The negativity typically revolved around both the price and the length of bus travel, side effects of week-long trips. “Some trips were a 20 minute activity [followed by] a 3 hour bus ride over and over again,” says TGS senior, Lauren Wiedebush, though she added that some student complaints were exaggerated.
Travel-based interim weeks have also proved testing for teacher chaperones who typically have to oversee the safety and wellbeing of large groups of students. TGS English teacher Mrs. Young, who has previously chaperoned, describes the experience as “Strenuous. Very strenuous.”
Underwhelming feedback eventually led to the removal of spring interim week during the 2017-18 school year, but it returns this semester with a focus on Tucson’s community.
Mrs. Young, who played a key role in proposing this new interim week, describes its inception, “Last spring, Mr. Young and I reunited with a good friend of ours, Isaac Villegas, who is instrumental in humanitarian and refugee services. We got to talking about Tucson’s particular needs. This conversation came on the heels of last year’s spring interim. We started brainstorming alternatives that would bring us more together as a community, getting us all in a similar frame of mind regarding education and community service.”
Rather than taking long distance trips by class, this interim week will see the mixing of high schoolers and eighth graders into groups that will take on different community service projects. Students have volunteered for one of twelve service options such as helping to organize the Special Olympics in Safford or working with Tucson programs for migrants and refugees such as Casa Alitas.
This new format will heavily reduce travel costs and completely eliminate the price of interim week for students. It still won’t be cheap for the school, however. “The cost of interim week [is] always transportation because we don’t have buses,” says Mrs. Patton, “So, for example, when we take 50 kids to Safford [for the Special Olympics during spring interim week]... It’s around a thousand dollars.”
Interim week at TGS has had a turbulent history, but its evolution has been primarily driven by the student body, maybe more than they realize.
Mrs. Patton says, “We really do want [the new interim week] to be mission-driven, but we also want it to be meaningful for students. So if a student has an idea for interim week, this is the time to reach out to me for next year. We want it to be a meaningful experience for kids.”
Written by both Liam Conroy and Leo Gruenstein