Those who escaped summer school may sympathize with those who didn’t.

When you flunked a semester of any subject, giving up part of your summer to redo a class isn’t something you want to do.

Many schools help those who failed classes redo them without attending summer school.

Lexington District 2 in the Cayce-West Columbia area, Dawn Kujawa said, offers Content Recovery for high and middle school students.

These credit recovery programs allow students to satisfy course requirements in a fraction of the time depending on how much knowledge they gained the first time around.

Just over one million high-school students in almost 16,000 of the nation’s 24,000 public high schools, took at least one credit-recovery class in the 2015-16 school year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of U.S. Department of Education data.

Most credit-recovery classes are taken online, some led by a teacher.

In some districts, credit recovery has replaced traditional summer school and fewer students have to repeat a grade.

Students who take advantage of the option typically have failed a class and don’t want to attend summer school, repeat the class or be held back from advancing a grade or graduating.

Some schools praise the programs for boosting graduation rates, but some educators question their rigor.