What to Do About the School Calendar

Like the drawing of attendance areas and the determining of daily starting and ending times, arranging the school calendar can be fraught with contention. Let’s start with the basics. The vast majority of U.S. states (three-fifths) require 180 student contact days—in other words, days when school is in session and students are present. A handful of states require fewer days, an even smaller handful more days. Apart from guidelines in a few states, decisions about how to array those school attendance days across the calendar are local prerogatives.

Traditionally the American school year has begun around Labor Day and ended around Memorial Day, give or take a couple of weeks. This pattern is not universal even among English-speaking countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, public schools provide 190 attendance days, usually extending from September to late June or early July. Australia’s students, in the Southern Hemisphere, start the school year in January or early February and finish up in mid-December, with their longest holiday coinciding with Easter.

In recent years some groups and individuals here in the United States have touted the advantages of “year-round” schools. Funding constraints usually argue against increasing the number of attendance days, and so “year-round” must be taken simply to mean arranging attendance days differently, most often by shortening the traditional long summer break and inserting longer breaks during the other seasons.

There is no one best way to arrange the school calendar. Common variations include these models in which the first number represents consecutive attendance days (weekends and holidays excepted) and the second number represents vacation days: 45-15, 60-20, and 45-10. As an example, here’s a link to a 45-15 calendar used during the 2007-08 school year in the Beaufort County Schools in South Carolina: http://www.nayre.org/Beaufort,%20SC%202007-08_Year_Round_Calendar.pdf.

Salem News (www.salemnews.com) provided a succinct overview of a few important pros and cons concerning year-round school schedules:

• Kids in year-round schools are at an academic advantage. A Duke University study found that kids in year-round schools are less likely to forget what they’ve learned because they don’t experience the long break that occurs during summer vacations with traditional schools. That’s a sentiment echoed by Charles Ballinger, executive director emeritus of the National Association for Year-Round Education. “The longer students are away from material, the more forgetting occurs,” Ballinger says.

• Kids spend the same amount of time in the classroom, just on a different schedule. When many people hear “year-round schooling” they understandably assume kids will be spending more time in the classroom. In fact, many year-round schools have the same 180 days of schooling as their traditional counterparts, they just have shorter, more frequent breaks. This schedule, proponents of year-round schools suggest, helps to keep the education process ongoing, unlike traditional systems wherein students must re-acclimate themselves to school after long breaks.

• What about child care? Parents opposing year-round schools often cite the potential difficulty finding child care should their school system make the switch. Traditional summer vacations enable parents to use college students also on summer hiatus to look after their children, or send the kids off to day camp. Shorter breaks during fall and spring offer no such luxury, making it difficult, particularly for single parents, to find adequate child care.

• Aren’t kids busy enough as it is? Opponents of year-round schools also suggest kids today, who tend to be involved in more extra-curriculars than their parents ever were, are busy enough and need the traditional summer break to relax and regroup.

Certainly there are additional pros and cons. The bottom line is that making a school calendar is a local decision and it must conform to local needs as well as be educationally sound. The only  meaningful way to go about designing the local school calendar is to involve community members, including students and educators, in determining how best to respond to the needs and desires of the largest majority of citizens.