Extended School Year for Elementary

Call it what you will: a modified calendar, year-round schooling; but the extended school year for elementary students has parents on both sides of the debate weighing in.

The pressure to look into doing school year round, began in the late 90’s with the publication of the report, "A Nation at Risk". The report essentially compared American students to their counterparts in other industrialized nations to discover that while the United States ranks first in self-esteem, it ranks last in math and science compared to other countries like Japan, China, Finland, and Sweden.

In the United States, most states require schooling for 180 days per year, whereas many other nations do school more days per year and school longer during the day. The logic then followed that if other countries do better than the United States in testing, and they have more school, then perhaps American students should also have more school as well.

However, there are some distinct advantages to having an extended school year for elementary students.

Believe it or not the concept of public education is relatively new. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that public school was available to anyone whether they be rich or poor, and it wasn’t until 1918 that all of the states in the union at that time had laws requiring at least elementary school attendance.

Given this late start, it’s important to realize that many children at that time were from farming families. Families had to farm to survive, and in order to farm, they had to have all hands available to harvest. In some farming communities, kids simply did not show up for school during the harvest season. Consequently, out of both necessity and practicality, school started shortly after the harvest (in September) and ended before the harvest in May or June. A more modern day comparison would be Inuit children who as late as the 50’s and 60’s still missed school during the preparation for winter, and winter months which sometimes shortened their school year substantially.

Proponents of schooling year round point out that allowing children to go home to help with the harvest is no longer a need in most communities.

Proponents of schooling year round also point to a more fluid experience when children are allowed to continue learning with minimal interruptions. Most schools that school year round, take shorter, but more frequent breaks during the school year. Consequently, students don’t forget quite as much material as they are prone to do over a longer two month break. Teachers spend less time reviewing when schools adopt an extended year schedule and spend more time teaching new material. There are allegedly less gaps in learning with a more consistent school schedule.

There are a few other benefits that proponents point out about switching to a year round school schedule:

• More frequent breaks means less opportunity for burn out.
• Some school districts report increased test scores without improving the core curriculum.
• In a multi-tracking system, schools can improve over-crowdedness and save the expense of building a new school even with increased maintenance and higher teacher salaries.

While it seems like extended year schooling might provide the most consistent learning experience for children, there is some opposition to extended year schooling.

At one point, many school districts in Texas went to extended year schooling, only for half of the districts to switch back to a traditional school system saying that to fight the parents was simply too difficult.

One issue is that many parents arranged their work schedules according to a traditional school system. To switch can make finding day care and baby sitting options difficult. In addition, if you have multiple children, and they’re not on the same schedule, it can pose some real challenges.

In order to play sports, you have to have other teams to play. Going to a year round school may well mean that you have practice and games during school break to accommodate other schools in the district. In some schools where there are multi-tracks, students on the same team may not be on the same track, and consequently arranging practice times may be really difficult. The same holds true for other extra curricular activities like academic competitions and marching band.

It seems that to optimize learning, extended school years are simply a good idea. However, convincing the general population might be a more difficult proposition. One idea that some districts have implemented is to change only the elementary level to year round schooling. By making small steps it may be possible to achieve big change.

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