Back to the grind for some students

BURBANK — Barely a four-day weekend out of spring semester, hundreds of students in the Burbank Unified School District finished their first day of summer school Tuesday afternoon.

The front steps of John Burroughs High School were flooded with teenagers as the final bell rang at 1 p.m. Burroughs is the site for high school summer school classes this year and students like Heather Markow, 16, said it was crowded as ever.

"There's a lot of people from different schools, so there's so many people," Heather said.

Her first-semester geometry class was packed, she said. With the sun shining strong and the prospect of picking up in her studies where she had just left off last week, Heather was not happy.

"They should give us, like, at least a week to rest," she said.

Also unhappy was Gor Unjuglyan, 15, a Burbank High School student taking summer school at Burroughs. He didn't get all of the classes he wanted because there was a waiting list for them.

His friends Nova Baghdasarian, 15, and Harout Simonyan, 15, also missed out on classes they wanted to take this summer.

"A lot of people who got signed up didn't get what they wanted," Gor said.

High school summer classes include dozens of choices in English, math, science, history, language and career technical studies.

Tuesday was also time for the elementary and middle schools to open their doors to summer school learners. Elementary aged students were sent to Walt Disney, Edison, Emerson and George Washington elementary schools.

Middle school students were sent to John Muir Middle School. Special education classes were also made available for middle and high school students Tuesday, with elementary summer school classes starting Monday.

Some Regional Occupation and summer job programs have begun this week as well.