OUR VIEW

Try year-round school
Published on: 09/06/04

Most Georgia families aren't growing corn in the back yard and don't have an okra crop waiting to be picked. So why are schools still clinging to a calendar designed for farm families who needed their children home during the summer to work in the fields?

Today's nine-month school calendar is a remnant of the old agricultural economy. The family farms disappeared, but the agrarian-based calendar lingers, forcing parents to scramble to occupy their kids for 11 weeks of the summer.

Under a banner of saving summer and helping the tourism industry, state Reps. Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta) and Joe Wilkinson (R-Sandy Springs) joined a group of parents last week to push for a later start to the school year. They prefer the longer, lazier summers of old, when the school break would end after Labor Day and students would resume classes today.

Given the present-day working families and single-parent households, that nostalgia seems out of step. If any tweaking is done to school calendars, systems should look at year-round schedules that better fit the realities of the modern American family and today's students.

At the same time, more Georgia schools should also consider going beyond the standard six hours a day of classes and the 180 days a year of school. While neither a longer year nor a longer day guarantees academic success, research does suggest that at-risk students benefit from more time on task.

Although the 3,000-plus year-round schools in this country follow varied schedules, a lot of them opt for a six-week abbreviated summer and shorter breaks throughout the rest of the year. Combined, year-round schools serve 2.3 million students, according to the National Association for Year-Round Education.

The traditional calendar is often preferred by parents who have the time and money to create enriching summers for their children, enrolling them in space camps and escorting them to museums. But parents with fewer resources are often forced to leave their kids home alone in front of the television.

"In modern American families, the large majority of kids go home to single families or households where both parents work outside the home, so the traditional notion of summer vacation doesn't really map onto their experience," says Harris Cooper, a Duke University professor who leads the national research on year-round schools.

Cooper's research is cited both by people in favor of and opposed to year-round schools. That's because he's found only a slight improvement in academics from the change, except among low-income and struggling students. For them, Cooper says the academic gains appear more significant.

Year-round schools should be decided on a system-by-system basis. Affluent suburban districts — with high student achievement — should be perfectly free to keep or even lengthen their summer breaks, if that's what parents prefer.

Year-round schools seem an ideal fit for districts with large numbers of children who don't speak English and go home to families where they don't have opportunities to practice their English during the summer. The schedule may also help impoverished rural counties where the summer camp pickings are few, and children lack meaningful activities.

Teachers in those low-income communities can testify to Cooper's finding that students on average lose one month of learning over the summer break. Students in year-round schools lose only about half that much, says Cooper.

In communities that have adopted year-round schools, parents and teachers often overcome their initial misgivings and become fans, says Cooper. "Teachers recognize that they are not being asked to teach more and that the multiple shorter breaks may assist in recharging their own batteries and help keep their kids on task and allow them to give their kids timely remediation."

Not surprisingly, the strongest opposition to year-round schools comes from the tourism industries, which benefit from a protracted summer. The best interests of children have to determine the school calendar, not the best interests of amusement parks.