In junior high we had one year of "year round" school. I think they were running it as a pilot to see how it went. To my knowledge, it fell flat on its face. School sports and inter-school academic leagues were likely a big reason for that at the junior high and high school levels. Unless every school in your region goes along with it, coordination becomes a nightmare. Parents and teachers alike also complained that it made planning difficult if one child was in year round school and another was not. Also, there aren't a lot of camps or other activities to sign the kids up for when they get two weeks off in the middle of a random non-summer month. Personally, I recall liking year-round school since an entire summer off got rather boring.
Fast forward to now and I feel like I have become a huge proponent of the traditional school calendar. This issue came to light recently because I ride through a couple of school zones on my way to work. Parents dropping their kids off are a rough bunch. They have little patience for cyclists or other drivers. Why they don't just let their kids walk or ride their bikes to school is beyond me (these are junior high and high schoolers). I have been eagerly awaiting the end of the school year so I don't have to navigate the maze of parents in their over-sized SUVs.
When Memorial Day came and went and the students were still there I looked up the school calendar. Turns out they are on an 11 month school year calendar (July off). I was bummed out for selfish reasons, but then I started to feel bad for the kids. Elementary age kids need unstructured play time to develop creativity and life skills. High school kids need time to decompress from the stress of endless tests and paper writing. Also, how are kids from non-wealthy families supposed to save for college if they can't work over the summer? I think summer vacation is more than just a holdout from our agrarian society days; it is an essential part of producing kids that can think for themselves and entertain themselves.
We did a few years of year round school - elementary and middle school were year round in Parker (but only Parker - Lakewood was on the traditional schedule). I remember both liking it and hating it - yes, the longest we were ever off of school was for 3 weeks in November. Of course, we had 4 tracks in Middle School - A-D, so only 3 tracks were only ever in school at a time except for 2 weeks in July where they switched over to the new school year (in which there was no school). B track was the closest to the regular school year, but A track had from Thanksgiving to the week after Christmas off. D track went the most through summer, so it wasn't very popular.
ReplyDeleteThey didn't do year round school in high school because of the summer jobs and sports thing. And the year round system was probably craptackular for households where both parents worked.