SALISBURY — Rowan-Salisbury Schools is offering expanded summer school mostly because of state mandates, and will hire hundreds more summer faculty for the programs.

Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Jason Gardner said the summer programming normally employs about 100 teachers during the break, but this year the district is hiring about four times the normal number of teachers

Gardner said summer learning camps are normally only run for students in first through third grades. Expanding it to all grade levels this year has greatly increased the number of hires, and the district is offering a pay incentive for teachers who participate as well. Gardner said the incentive is necessary to staff the programs at this level.

Gardner said the district was lucky to have about the right amount of interest it needed to staff the programs.

“It has been a pretty big undertaking,” Gardner said.

Summer programs will cost more than $2 million because of the number of staff, which is entirely funded by state and federal funds. The district always receives funding from the state for its first through third grades Read to Achieve program, and the funding for all the additional programming will come from a block of $66 million in federal COVID-19 relief.

Gardner said he expects federal relief funding will pay for the additional programming mandated by the state legislature.

The federal funding comes with stipulations attached. Broadly, it must be used to offset learning loss due to COVID-19 and improve air quality in school facilities.

When the district applied for the federal funding, Superintendent Tony Watlington told the RSS Board of Education the district needed to focus on measures that will reduce the number of low-performing schools. Schools that fall in to that category pose a threat to the district’s renewal status, which will come up for review in 2023.

Gardner said the magnitude of summer programming this year is an anomaly. In a normal situation, the district would not be able to fund something on this scale. Also in a normal year, there may not be enough interest on the part of families to justify the expense, he said.

At middle school and above, interest in summer school drops off significantly. Elementary programs are only open to at-risk students. There are 955 elementary students enrolled in math summer school and 1,119 enrolled in English. At the high school level only 125 students are enrolled in remedial math and 105 in English.

“We are definitely going to look at this data really intensely,” Gardner said. “Because I want to get a better feel on this scaled-up version and the amount of impact it really makes.”

Gardner said the district has to give a diagnostic assessment to students at the beginning and end of the programs they participate in.