Year Round Education

The year round education (YRE) issue has been around for many years. As of the 2006/2007 school year there were approximately 3,181 schools in 46 states in our nation utilizing some form of the year round school calendar. The four states that do not have any form of year round school calendar are New Hampshire, Maine, Mississippi and Wyoming. California, of course, led the nation with 1,322 schools operating on some form of the year round schedule, following by Hawaii with 296 and Arizona with 175. There are many issues to address when considering the year round school schedule. Some of the very first things that come to my mind are the top issue my daughters faced when switching from private to public schools in the last two years. The public schools in our district rank very high in the state for educational achievement, however both the high school and the elementary school are both operating at or beyond full capacity. The easy answer to that would be to build new schools but when the state is barely able to cover the funding to pay teachers it makes me wonder where they will come up with the money to build a few new schools, let alone furnish and staff them. Sure, they could raise taxes but in our economy I am sure I speak for many when I say “who can afford more taxes”? As a matter of fact, my younger daughter is attending the Elementary school. At the end of last year, the district announced that the new primary school would be opened in the fall of 2010, housing kindergarten through second grade. My daughter, who is in the 5th grade this year, would for the first time, be attending the Elementary school with only the third, fourth and fifth grade in it. The trailers would no longer be necessary. The lunchroom would no longer be overcrowded. The classroom size would be smaller. New facilities would be put in to place such as a new science lab. Well, here we are, some 6 weeks into the new school year and the primary school is still not completed. The classes are still overcrowded. There is no additional funding in the school budget for teachers so unless the classrooms are over 34 children each, they cannot hire another teacher. They do not have teacher’s assistants or aides to assist with so many children. My daughter’s class has 32 kids. The buses are overcrowded. At the beginning of October, the entire school will be uprooted as the younger grades move to the newly opened primary school and the older kids start switching classrooms. The school estimates it should take no more than one week to make “the move” but that is a full week of learning time for these kids. And maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot of time but to a child trying to learn the basic skills to pass these state standardized tests that are crammed down their throats all year long a classroom with 32 other children, those 5 days could be detrimental. For anyone that is not familiar with YRE I will start with a brief definition. Year Round School (YRS) are schools that restructure the traditional school calendar, August to June, to a calendar such that learning followed by vacations are spread throughout the entire year to make learning more continuous. These YRS do not add additional days to the standard 180 days of learning but instead just reorganize the days. Typically YRS use the single track with unified attendance or a multi-track with staggered attendance, or some combination of both. The single track provides the entire student body and staff the same school calendar with the same attendance days and vacation time. The multi-track divided the students and teachers into groups with staggered attendance days and vacation periods. Well, that leads me to the first of some of the many pros to year round school calendars. When the schools are overcrowded, a multi-track year round school schedule could possibly be the answer. New schools would not have to be built. These rickety little trailers that look like they would blow away during a hard wind storm we see outside our elementary school now would not be necessary. And of course, one of the key points in this is the money saved. According to research, Florida’s Marion County school system estimated a savings of more than $12 million in construction costs by switching to a multi-track year round school calendar. Imagine what could be done with $12 million dollars? That would pay quite a few teacher salaries and possibly some teacher assistants. Of course, the multi-track schedule does raise a lot of concerns for other reasons as well. If you have more than one child in school, there is no guarantee that they will both be on the same track in the multi-track system. Then my next issues are the research and statistics on summer learning loss. The teachers seem to spend the first six weeks of back to school giving refresher courses in last year’s learning. That’s like starting out behind. I know my kids always look forward to summer break but about three or four weeks into it they are bored and ready to go back to school. This topic came to my attention during this last summer and I have been very interested in finding out more about. I have read quite a bit about the topic and so far I must say that I am leaning toward being more of a proponent than an opponent to the YRS.