re: Year Round School - La Legislative proposal

I wish they would couple this idea with removing daylight savings time. I think multiple breaks works better than the long summer.

I was a high school biology teacher for 6 years and then was a middle school and high school principal for over 10 years. I am in full support of the year-round school. The first nine weeks of class in pretty much any school is spent reviewing the content of the previous grade. As a biology teacher, I had to spend a good bit of time refreshing the students on basic scientific principles just so I could begin teaching my content. There is such a knowledge retention problem in schools today. a lot of students simply do not retain knowledge from the past year over the summer break. I think this gap would be at least partially addressed with a shorter summer break. I understand that it is the same number of instructional minutes over the course of a school year, but with a two-month break from school vs. a 2 or 3-week break, I think the retention issue would not be nearly as bad as it is now.

You my friend are a total idiot, I am as conservative as they come and I never tried to indoctrinate any student in liberal thinking.
However, the loss of knowledge is a real issue in today's schools.

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True, but they had to create a transportation system with Covid as none of the buses were running.

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Yeah, again, I didn't know if they did that, or just didn't offer bussing for that time.

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be better at detecting sarcasm

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Fair enough. It's hard to tell on here sometimes...

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It's hard to tell on here sometimes...

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except when the posts I was obviously mocking was on the same page

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Basically 2 months of school then 2 week break year round vs long summer. Same # of school days.

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Seems like it would completely wreck athletics and other extracurriculars.

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Seems like it would completely wreck athletics and other extracurriculars.

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How so? They would adjust. Spring sports would end later. Other sports could take breaks during the season, just have a couple of bye weeks.

Did something like this for first 4 years of school. They called it "45-15", meaning we had 45 days on and 15 days off, and it was done in part to help overcrowding in a fast growing county (Pasco County FL).

All it really did was spread the learning loss around the year. Scores were not particularly improved.

Additionally, it was a logistical nightmare, as the students were tracked into 4 groups, with one of them out at a time. So, if you were on Track A, you got pretty much all of December off and if you were on Track D, you got pretty much all of January off. But, Tracks C & D got only the two weeks right at Christmas and were either coming off only 15 days of school (starting in early December), or were going to come back for 15 days of school before going on break in late January.

The practical upshot was that the busing routes and classroom allocation was changing every 3 weeks. There wasn't extra room for each track to have dedicated classrooms, so the first year, every student's schedule changed every three weeks. This affected two of my brothers.

I had a different problem. I went to a very small school where we only had one classroom for each grade. This meant the students in the classroom were different each track change. Teachers had to deal with knowing which students were coming off of vacation and account for them having not experienced the instruction for the previous 15 days.

Again, it was a nightmare. And, that's before you account for sports and extracurricular activities, which would require participants who are on one of their vacation tracks to continue going to practice during that vacation.

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ome of the most common arguments against year-round schools include:

Studies have not conclusively proven the academic benefits.
Students forget information just as easily with a three-week break as 10. Therefore, teachers on a year-round system end up with four periods of review instead of just one at a new school year.
Summer programs such as youth camps suffer.
Student summer employment becomes virtually impossible.
Many older school buildings do not have air conditioning, making a year-round schedule impractical.
Band and other extracurricular programs can run into problems scheduling practices and competitions, which often take place during the summer months.
With multitracking, parents could have students at the same school on different schedules.

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Pros and Cons of Year-Round School

I am sympathetic to the idea of year-round schools, as so many people don't have a plan or adequate resources to deal with their kid being home all summer. But, I would not recommend this course of action.