Eighth-graders Sydney Battle, Sean Barbour and Jorden Butler haven’t been begging to go to school on Saturday mornings, but when they’re at Mitchellville’s Ernest Everett Just Middle School, they start rapping about exponents and their mood changes.

“Sometimes I didn’t know what I was learning [during school], like subtracting integers,” said Sean, a 13-year-old from Largo. “Now I’ve mastered it… step by step.”

Sean and about 90 other Ernest Just Middle students work with math teachers during a new Saturday academy that focuses on tougher topics ahead of statewide standardized tests in March.

“The students needed something outside the classroom, something that was different, engaging and fun,” said Margaret Lloyd, a seventh-grade math teacher.

Principal Carlton Carter said he hopes in-class help, coupled with the review of fundamental skills during the Saturday sessions, will boost the school’s scores on the exams. Two-thirds of seventh-grade students and about 48 percent of eighth-grade students passed the math section of the assessment in 2011, according to data from the state department of education.

Countywide in Prince George’s, those numbers were 59.7 percent and 43.7 percent, respectively.

The teachers used data from countywide assessments to pinpoint the eight topics hardest for students to grasp, said academy co-coordinator Lawrence Pugh, an eighth-grade math teacher. These included operations with integers, percentages, probability and exponents. Students rotate through the five teachers’ classrooms every Saturday to review each objective in mini-lessons that link academics to the world outside the classroom, he said.

“They love money. You apply anything real-world, and they understand it much more,” Pugh said. “They see the relevance to what they’re doing in the classroom.”

A banker from Educational Systems Credit Union, who teaches one session in the Saturday morning rotation, drives home that connection, Pugh said, with lessons on interest rates, savings accounts and how to balance a checkbook.

Mitchellville resident Monica Williams, vice president of the school’s parent-teacher-student association, said lessons at the academy reinforce how her eighth-grade son, Jabari, can apply computation skills to complicated problems.

“The teachers are trying to find ways to make [math] more real,” Williams said. “They’re pulling out all the stops to get the kids what they need.”

Carter is using about $10,000 from the school’s budget — plus the $30 per-student fee paid by PTSA members whose children attend the academy and the $60 fee paid by non-members — to fund the Saturday sessions.

About 250 students inquired about the academy, Carter said, but expanding it to include more students or more subjects would depend on securing more funding. He estimated it would cost $75,000 to run the 11-week academy for all 750 of his students.

The PTSA, which now pays for supplies and snacks, will start a weekly Zumba exercise class on Wednesday to raise additional funds, said Karla Evans, PTSA president.

Theresa Saunders, president of the county’s Council of Parent-Teacher Associations, said members of the council are working to develop tutoring initiatives and resources that can be spread countywide.

When Carter suggested the idea of a Saturday academy to other middle school principals at a recent meeting, “they thought it was hot,” he said, though they had concerns about funding and the securing commitments from staff to work an extra day.

That’s not the case at Ernest Just Middle, where Pugh, Lloyd and other teachers are asking for more attitude during the exponents rap or making a funny, but helpful, addition to the acronym students use to remember the order of operations.

“If you’re doing things during school, the Saturday school helps refresh your memory and break things down,” Jorden said.

abrownback@gazette.net