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from School Magazine October 30, 2002
Should Schools Be Open All Year?
by Avis Cunningham
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Are you ready to give up your summer vacation and go to school all year? Officials in some school districts are changing the school calendar. As a result, students are attending classes during the summer and taking breaks at other times of year. As bizarre as this idea might sound, it does offer advantages. A year-round schedule reduces school overcrowding, improves teachers’ lives, and helps students learn.
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Right now, most schools follow the traditional nine-month calendar in which school is in session from September to June. Over the last ten years, though, the number of schools open all year has risen steadily. In 1990, only 859 schools and 733,660 students followed a year-round schedule. By 1999, those numbers had increased to almost 3,000 schools and over 2,000,000 students.
Why give up the traditional schedule? For one thing, the original reason for the nine-month school year no longer exists. The nine-month model was developed in the nineteenth century because most families worked on farms. During the summer months, parents needed their children’s help to harvest crops. These days, not as many families farm for a living, and those who still farm do not depend as much on family labor. For this reason, students do not have to be home during the summer as they once did.
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How does the year-round schedule work? In most cases students spend the same amount of time in school as they do on a traditional schedule—about 180 days. The difference is that vacations are spread throughout the year. School districts break up the year-round calendar in different ways. The most popular schedule divides the year into four nine-week terms. Each term is followed by a three-week vacation. Four additional weeks serve as winter vacation, spring break, and other holidays. On other year-round plans, students attend school for three twelve-week terms with breaks of three or four weeks and additional time for summer vacation. Still another plan divides the year into two sessions of eighteen weeks and six vacation weeks, with four weeks for holidays.
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