LEWISTON — To help students catch up academically, Longley Elementary School is moving closer to becoming year-round school. And this fall Longley students’ school day will increase from 6½ hours to 7 hours, Principal Linda St. Andre told the Lewiston School Committee on Monday night.

Committee members applauded the plan. Committee chairman Tom Shannon called it “thoughtful, ambitious and creative.”

Longley will start a large summer school program where more than half of the school’s population — 176 students out of 320 — are enrolled to go to school from June 25 to Aug. 3, St. Andre said. “We’re very proud of that,” she said.

The need is great, she said. “The summer time is a critical piece for us,” St. Andre said. Students are out of school “for so long, perhaps not speaking English or perhaps not reading.” Their loss of learning “from spring to fall is huge. This year we followed it carefully to see how long it took them to make it up. For most of our students it took until the January (testing) to be back where they were in May of the last year.”

Historically test scores at Longley, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New England, have been the lowest in Lewiston. Today the majority of Longley students come from Somalia immigrant families and are learning English. This year’s test scores showed that 15 percent of Longley students were proficient in reading, compared to 56 percent in Lewiston and 72 percent statewide.

Federal recommendations call for adding 300 hours of instructional time a year to give students time to learn. “That’s huge. You’re talking about year-round school,” St. Andre said. “At this point we’re not there, but we are doing our best to get as close to that as possible.”

Students will go to summer school four days a week this summer, St. Andre said. Grades 2-6 will go to school 90 minutes a day; grades K-1, three hours a day.

This summer 12 teachers and 4 ed techs will teach, helped by four Lewiston Regional Technical Center high school students enrolled in pre-school programs.

Plus, older students have volunteered to tutor younger students in reading and writing through a “scripted” program called “Learning Together.”

“The kids are very excited about it,” St. Andre said. “They are thrilled to be teachers in summer school. When I presented this in the fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms, they said, ‘How do we sign up?’”

Research shows with these kinds of programs “the scores of the tutors really rise.”

This year a federal grant the school has to improve poor test scores, the so called turn-around grant, will pay for extra instructional time. But St. Andre said she’s built a plan to expand learning so the changes are sustainable in and beyond 2013-14, the year the grant money ends.

In the fall of 2013, some teachers would start the school year two weeks later and end a week earlier, freeing up three weeks they could teach in the summer, she said. That would pay for half of the six-week summer lessons, St. Andre said.

The longer school day would begin this fall for all Longley students, changing from the existing 8:40-3:10 p.m. to 8:25-3:25 p.m.

“We’re proposing that the first period of the morning be breakfast in the classrooms,” a kind of take-out bag that’s in classrooms when students arrive. Students would eat as they settle in and go over the day’s plans with teachers in a kind of breakfast meeting, St. Andre said.

Superintendent Bill Webster said the plan is an exciting opportunity “to explore something that isn’t being done anywhere in Maine I’m aware of.” He cautioned there could be trouble with the teachers union, there will be debate on whether the change is school policy or working conditions.

“There will be some angst for sure, but at this point, this is consistent with the contract,” Webster said. “Many teachers think this is great. The average person working today works year-round and gets vacation subject to employer approval. Teachers will still only work a 182-day schedule.”

Committee member Linda Scott asked whether students will be too warm to learn, going to school in an unairconditioned building in the middle of the summer.

“It may be warm,” St. Andre said, adding classes will be held in the morning when the building is cooler. “My feeling is if they weren’t in school, where would those kids be, and would it be any cooler there?”

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