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Since Saturday, the students have been frolicking in the Pucillo Gymnasium pool, lounging in the lobbies and halls of their dorms and basking in the sunshine around MU's pond.
But a closer look reveals it's not all fun and games.
While hanging out in the lobby, the students are being quizzed on the periodic table and the difference between "rarefaction" and "refraction."
In the halls, they're figuring out how to graph a math problem that's posted on the dorm wall. Around the pond, they've been reading "Of Mice and Men" and "The House on Mango Street."
And when they toss around beach balls in the pool, the balls are marked with questions such as "What does Renaissance mean?" and "What does the atomic number represent?" that each student must answer.
Instead of a traditional recreational summer camp, the students are enrolled in Project Access, a concentrated summer school program that sounds like a recipe for failure: combine 12 kids who have flunked ninth grade at least once, most of them twice, and make them study math, science, social studies and English for more than 12 hours a day for nine straight days in the middle of summer.
Despite their checkered academic careers, the students have risen to the challenge, devouring a novel a day and acing nearly every assessment they've taken toward their ultimate goal: earning enough course credits to enter 10th grade in the fall.
"None of us were really sure we'd have kids who would want to do this much work," program coordinator Carol Welsh said. "But I think it has way far exceeded any expectations we had for it."
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The "accelerated credit-recovery program," the first of its kind for School District of Lancaster, works because students are forced to eat, sleep and breathe the subjects they're learning — but in an active, fun way, Welsh said.
"It's a long day, but we do some kinds of things that make it more interesting," said Brittany Hull, 15. "It's cool being around these people."
The students live on campus and follow a rigorous schedule that includes reporting for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and classes at 8:30 a.m.
Instruction continues until 10 p.m. every day, including weekends, and lights must be out at 11:30 p.m.
The students are taught by six teachers in their 20s, most of them recent MU postbaccalaureate graduates who spent the past year interning in SDL schools.
Students receive classroom instruction for about six hours a day, Welsh said, but in nontraditional ways.
For much of the rest of the day, they're in motion, walking to and from their dorms, their next classes, the pond, the cafeteria, the pool, the basketball courts.
As they move around, their teachers — most of whom also live on campus — constantly drill them on what they learned earlier in the day or week. Impromptu oral quizzes can break out anywhere.
"We'll take them down to the kitchen to eat a little bit, and we'll talk about what we're reading," communication arts teacher Andrew Bundy, 27, said. "When we walk, we talk."
About 4 p.m., students get a pool break, but the learning doesn't stop. They must answer questions scrawled in permanent marker on beach balls.
"When did World War I start?" social studies teacher Abby Lavery, 28, shouted out to five students treading water in the deep end Wednesday.
When a girl shouted back "1914!" Lavery gave her a "Woo-hoo!"
Math teacher Jared Mizrahi, a 20-year-old MU senior, took his students golfing and used clubs as an X-axis and golf tees to create ordered pairs to explain a problem.
Math students also can be found outside on all fours, working out problems in chalk on the sidewalk, or inside, using classroom floor tiles as grids.
Basketball isn't part of the curriculum, but Bundy's students begged him to let them shoot hoops earlier in the week.
"Their leverage was, 'We'll shoot, you ask questions,' " he recalled. "So they knew that we needed to get this energy out, but we also needed to be learning."
The immersion approach to learning has enabled his students to zip through "The Crucible," "Mango Street" and "Mice and Men" in just four days. Next up: "Romeo and Juliet."
"It's a big deal to these kids — it's a big deal to anyone — to have read this many books in this short amount of time," Bundy said.
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Jose Delgado, 16, said he never felt comfortable reading aloud at McCaskey East because he gets nervous in front of large groups, but he willingly read passages from "Mice and Men" to three other students in the lobby of Diehm Hall on Wednesday.
"People would tease you about the way you read, how slow you read, if you can't pronounce a word right," he said.
"But here, I feel comfortable because we're all the same — we're in the same spot, the same shoes, doing the same thing, learning the same thing."
Jose is confident he'll make up the two classes he failed and return to McCaskey East in the fall.
His main goal when he returns, Jose said, will be to stay more focused.
"I'm the type of person that gets distracted easily, especially by friends and groups and stuff like that," he said.
"I skipped school a lot. Even though I knew it was wrong, I thought it would be fun and it wouldn't hurt me at all," he said.
The MU program has taught him that "the work actually does pay off," Jose said. "We've been having practice tests, and pretty much everybody gets only one or two wrong. We're doing pretty good."
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The students can earn up to two credits, the equivalent of two courses, through the free program, which is funded by the Pennsylvania College Access Challenge Grant program, through Project Grad.
McCaskey East is one of seven high schools in Pennsylvania sharing $4.2 million in grants under the two-year grant program, which is designed to get more economically disadvantaged students to attend college.
Welsh, the district's Project Grad academic consultant, said SDL counselors and teachers were looking for a way to get students who repeatedly failed ninth grade, a crucial transition year, the intensive help they needed.
They identified about 25 students, and Welsh set about trying to track them down. It took more than 150 telephone calls and 20 home visits to get commitments from the pupils, she said.
After the students complete Project Access, Welsh and McCaskey East counselors will work with them in the fall to make sure they stay on track in the regular school setting.
In addition to academics, Project Access includes daily career counseling sessions with MU's community service coordinator, Howard Jones.
Thursday, the pupils were writing research papers on the jobs they'd like to pursue.
"You should hear the careers these guys want to do," Bundy said.
"We have a couple of guys who want to be architects, some of them want to be lawyers, and they're realizing that to get those careers they're going to have to get it in gear.
"And it's going to be harder if they drop out of high school and try to claw their way to the top."
Devonte Crosby, 16, is planning to make up two credits this week and two more in SDL's traditional summer school program, which begins Tuesday — two days after the MU program ends.
Devonte flunked out of ninth grade twice, he said, because he was more concerned with "who I'm gonna hang out with, and what's cool and what's not cool" than he was with school.
"Being here, it made me realize, you know, that life is real," he said. "I need to get that diploma. Without that, I'm not going to be able to do anything in my life.
"It just makes me realize that I'm going to be grown up soon, basically, and it's time to really take stuff serious."
E-mail: bwallace@lnpnews.com
