For six weeks this summer, Poughkeepsie City School District students with exceptionalities learned about different countries while watching the Olympics, visited with firefighters while learning about superheroes, saw magic, enjoyed a carnival and even got a free Slurpee.

Roughly 75 students took part in the district’s extended school year program, which is open to qualifying special needs students to prevent regression of skills during the summer months. For five hours a day, five days a week at Krieger Elementary School, the students continued to learn while receiving their recommended services, be it speech, occupational or physical therapy, or counseling.

“They still have all their services they have during the school year,” said Alisa Balestrino, one of the district’s two coordinators of students with exceptionalities. The other, Triesha Foglia-Edwards, stressed “It’s not summer school. We don’t want it to feel like punishment that they’re coming to school in the summer.”

Far from it, the program, which is open to students entering the first through ninth grades, is more akin to educational summer camp. The students each day had a 30-minute active movement period, and they had access to the new playground at the school which, Balestrino said, the students relished.

There was a different theme for each of the six weeks: the great outdoors, community, shark week, superheroes, the Olympics and carnival.

“We give them supplies and activities for those weeks,” Balestrino said. “We do a couple different special events. The last day we always do carnival day, with outside activities and ice cream from Stewart’s Shops.”

During Olympics week each class picked a country out of a hat – Team USA was not among the countries available – and learned about their country while following along the medal count. The class whose country finished with the most medals received a small prize. The students also enjoyed Olympic-style events during their movement periods, such as relay races.

There were also individual highlights, such as a visit from City of Poughkeepsie firefighters and one of their engines, a magic show from Jackie the Magician and, on July 11, the students walked over to the 7-Eleven next to the school to get free Slurpees.

Foglia-Edwards pointed out, “The nice thing about the ESY program is, for those kids who really have a rough time – you don’t have all the other distractions you have during the school year. So we can really target when a child is having difficulties and really figure out how to adjust and what the kid needs.”

The program is made possible by a fleet of roughly 20 teachers, therapists and behavioral specialists, in addition to community volunteers and the transportation staff, as each student is provided bussing.

Foglia-Edwards called this edition of the program “probably the smoothest summer we had,” attributing that, in part, to continuity.

“We were in the same building as the year before, we had a lot of the same staff at the year before, so the transition for the kids was easier, it was something they were used to,” she said. “It went really, really well during the summer.”