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Year-round school in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search Ten percent of US public schools are currently using a year-round calendar. A research spotlight on year round education discusses the year round calendar. The basic year round calendar generates through a 45-15 ratio. This refers to students staying in school for 45 days but then get a 15 days of break. Students don't get the traditional Thanksgiving break, Christmas break, Spring break, and summer, but instead they have more frequent breaks during the year.

Contents

• 1Purpose For Year Round Schooling
• 2Effects on Students, teachers, and families
• 3Opposition
• 4References

Purpose of Year Round Schooling

Switching to year round schooling has many positive effects. One benefit that gets brought up frequently is that teachers get a year round job. Along the lines of teachers, they have more time to plan lessons and class activities while not taking as long to reteach information that was lost over the summer, also known as the summer slide. Another reason schools switch to year round is that the students get more frequent breaks and breaks are a longer duration of time. These breaks allow students to get a break during every season. Some families are in favor of the year round calendar because they are allowed to take vacations at different times of the year rather than specific time frames. This also allows for families to spend more time together.

Another purpose of year round schooling is a decrease of overcrowding. Some schools operate on three different cycles of school which would have three groups going to school at different times. This would allow for a larger number of students to attend the same school while not having super large class sizes. When this happens, it also allows for the school to be in constant use, rather than being unoccupied during breaks and summer.

Effect on students, teachers, and families

Year-round calendars can offer a way to reduce school crowding, A crowded school can adopt a multi-track year-round calendar, which staggers student schedules so that different groups of students attend on different calendars, or "tracks," with some students attending while others are on break. In this way the school can handle more students than it could if all students needed to be in school at the same time. Multi-track year-round calendars have been used to reduce crowding in California, greater Las Vegas, and greater Raleigh, North Carolina, among other places."

Compared to other ways to handle crowding -- such as busing or portable classrooms -- multi-track year-round calendars can be relatively inexpensive. However, if schools are open for longer, the operating and maintenance costs may increase up to 10 percent.

Opposition

Businesses that rely on summer leisure time dislike year-round calendars. Summer camps and amusement parks often lead political opposition to year-round calendars, but some opposition is led by upper middle class parents who value summer vacations. Rural areas rarely use year-round calendars because they conflict with farms' need for youth labor in summer. While this is not as big of an issue in most places, in the midwest it can be very difficult to find workers in the summer that are not in still in school. To have a year-round school you would have to pay teachers more money, which could increase the taxes in the area. This would be especially bad for poorer areas who already have issues with their schools. Tina Bruno says, "a short-term answer to overcrowding that rarely improves test scores, does not save money, causes rifts in communities, interferes with learning outside the classroom and makes it hard for teachers to participate in summer training programs to better themselves." There are many oppositions when it comes to year-round schooling.