What do you think about year around schooling?

My concern with smaller windows of free time spread throughout the year is the availability of vacation time for parents in middle and low income families. That might not be as big a problem in most of Texas, or the lower South, or California, but think about families who go through real winter. You don’t want to spend a week snowed-in at Grannie’s house or a small motel room. Spring and Fall dates might be better, but are still a roll of the dice for outdoor activities.

It’s mostly upper-middle income(and above) families that can afford to fly to a warmer climate for vacation. The vast majority of Americans take a week or just a long weekend vacation, or a few day trips to places within a reasonable drive from home. That gets them to an inexpensive hotel/motel/cabin/campsite at a nearby beach, lake, mountain resort, amusement park, etc. Many will stay with relatives.

If there are very few weeks of summer weather available when the kids are not in school that will mean that most families will have to cram their vacation plans into that short time. Most people work for small businesses, and it might be impossible to schedule vacations for every employee with kids into that short time period. And of course some employees without kids, possibly with more seniority, will want a vacation during the same period.

My wife is a teacher, so… In her situation, teachers get paid to work 155 days. If suddenly they were required to work a day more, the shit would hit the fan. Nobody would work more for the same pay. And nobody in town would vote for the new much higher school budget because their taxes would go up a lot.

Even here in Vermont it gets too hot and sticky to be on the third floor of a building with no ventilation. Due to fire codes, the classroom doors and hallway doors must remain closed 24/7. No exceptions, and teachers pay the fines, not the school. Nobody can have an A/C because the old wires would fry and burn the place down.

Please don’t bring up a 10 hour school day, either!

Is the first 5 a typo? Most kids in the US go 175-180 days.

I totally agree with this. Kids need more time free from school, not less.

Kids need time to play and enjoy themselves.

A 9 week break during the summer is reasonable. It gives families time to take vacations together and many kids go to a camp.

There’s boy scout camps, sports camps, and even science camps for children.

Summer break is already shorter than during my school years. We got a full 12 weeks off. I’d hate to see it shortened any more.

As people have mentioned long summer breaks are a deep grained american institution that few would want to see go away.

But I can see the benefit is mostly for the middle classes and up. I know poor families are desperate for activities to keep their kids busy around here and a day camp above $100 a week is out of the range for many families.

But if it’s the same number of school days, just with more one or two week-long breaks in there, you still have to pay the same fees. Except now you just have to arrange them eight or ten times throughout the year rather than two large blocks (summer/winter breaks).

If kids are getting year-round schooling, they’re spending more time in school, which means they’re graduating before age 18.

If that chain of logic seems suspect to you, check your assumptions. Having the same amount of vacation, even split up, makes for the same retention and onramp-offramp problems the current system does.

Now, what do we do with all those legal minors who’ve graduated the end of their mandatory schooling before colleges are prepared to accept them? Colleges are not in loco parentis, they don’t want to be, and they likely never will be, given the kinds of financial problems I see in the local college, the University of Montana. Employers don’t want them, because having a high school degree doesn’t make you employable. Their parents might want them in theory, but have no way to accommodate them 24/7/365 while working two or three jobs themselves. The military definitely doesn’t want them, and any Work Corps program would have a pricetag attached which would make you vomit.

Has anyone seen any data as to exactly how students spend their summer vacations? How much on jobs, travel, summer school, goofing off…?

Most of the time, I see this proposed as a solution to overcrowding - if there are three tracks and only two of the tracks are in school at a given time there can be more students assigned to a building. The biggest problem I see is getting all of the children in a household on the same track so that they have the same schedule.

As for some of the other things, some of them are issues only because of the current school schedule or under certain year-round schedules. For example, someone mentioned the difficulty of cramming vacations into a short period of time. Every year when my kids were young, we took a vacation during their February break - even though we don’t live in Texas or anywhere else it is warm year-round ( we went snowboarding). The prices for that week were much higher than for any other week in the winter except around Christmas/New Year’s precisely because those weeks had the highest demand because school was closed - if my kids had gone to a year round school and had three weeks off in Dec, Jan or Feb, we would have had more options and could have picked a less expensive week.* Having to fit all employees’ vacations into July only happens if the entire school is off in for the whole month of July - I’ve seen year round schedules where there is no time the entire school is off. Either they run the same x weeks on, Y weeks off schedule through the summer or each track gets a different month off in the summer.

  • We used to do a variation of this all the time. My kids school year started in September, so we would go the last week or two of August to a theme park in an area where school started in early to mid August. The prices weren’t necessarily lower- but the crowds were smaller.

The idea is that you forget less in a week than you do in three months, therefore multiple short breaks are better for learning than a couple long ones. There’s not the same retention problems; the schedule is explicitly designed around avoiding the retention problems longer breaks cause by shortening downtime periods.

It might be a good idea for the school, but it sure is going to make those overcrowded summer vacation spots even more overcrowded as summer vacations are set in a narrower window. Not to mention that it will probably put a damper on the economy of places that depend on a robust summer crowd, like Cape Cod. It might be helpful if states could stagger the summer vacation so that some districts have it in June, some in July and some in August.

There is a huge amount of confusion in this thread. Again, year-round school does not change the total annual vacation or school-time. It just spaces it differently.

Parents will be responsible for exactly the same number of childcare days.

Arranging it may be difficult, depending on the area. In smaller areas, where businesses hire sumer staff for day-care then fire them in the fall, shorter and more frequent breaks may be difficult. But in larger areas (e.g., Wake County, NC, whose schedule I linked to previously), schedules can be staggered, meaning that the childcare jobs can be full-time year-round.

More frequent breaks that are shorter lead to less learning loss than fewer, longer breaks. That’s what the research I referenced earlier studied.

Kids currently look forward to a long summer break, sure. But have you ever been around a class of eight-year-olds in late February, a couple of months away from winter break and with spring break a month or more in the future? If you offered those kids a three-week break I guarantee they’d jump at the opportunity. If you offered the teacher a three week break, they’d fall to their knees weeping with gratitude.

We had it in Virginia when I was a kid and it was a mess. Different kids were on different plans, so while I was off, some of my friends were in class. We’d end up hanging around the school waiting for our friends and sometimes getting in trouble, they only did it a couple of years before abandoning it.

I don’t really have a horse in this race, but I don’t think “things were a certain way when I was a kid, so that means they’re The Way Things Ought To Be” as a reason to do something.

I don’t object to shortening the summer break from the traditional 12 weeks to 9.

I finished the end of May and started right after labor day. Unless labor day fell late, like the fifth of Sept or later. Then we started the last Mon in Aug. That was really too long.
Summer School is getting harder to finish during the shorter break. My daughter took a class each summer semester this year. She started a few days after Spring semester and finished a few days before Fall semester started. Not much time to relax and unwind at all. She’s enrolled this Fall carrying 17 credit hours. I worry she’ll burn out at this pace. She’s trying to graduate with a BFA (performing arts) in 3 years. That means summer school next year too.

The real problem for summer vacation spots is the labor. All the theme parks around here start closing during the week as soon as school starts, because when the kids go back to HS, they don’t have the personnel to keep working. There’s this slow dance in TX where the districts push the legislature to let us go back to school earlier, get out earlier (because summer vacation is useless in TX in August, but it’s still nice in late May/early June) and the tourist industry pushes the legislature to mandate a start around Labor Day (because people up north will come vacation here, if they are open) .

Here in Maryland, we actually have gone in the opposite direction. Most counties began the school year in late August, so summer vacation was slightly over 2 months. Then our idiot Gov. Hogan decreed that schools had to wait until after Labor Day to open, and still had to finish the school year by mid-June. So now we’ve got a 12-week summer, and very minimal vacations during the year, with most of that being Christmas week and three days at Thanksgiving.

Before the decree, the only county where the schools didn’t open until after Labor Day was the county where Ocean City, MD is located. And funny thing, that’s where the idiot governor announced his decree. While saying he was doing it for the families, because how can you possibly squeeze in a vacation with your kids if the summer break’s only 9 or 10 weeks long?

The need for labor is probably going to depend on the area- I don’t doubt that what you said is correct for your area, but I mentioned earlier going to theme parks in the last two weeks of August because the crowds were smaller since the schools local to the theme parks had resumed. The thing is, those areas did not depend on local high school and college students. I’m not sure why, but everywhere we went - the theme parks, hotels, restaurants, even the highway rest areas - were full of people wearing nametags that included the country they were from.

It would totally wipe out certain businesses (summer camps).
It would raise costs in others (any of the shore/boardwalk businesses that hire HS kids) by reducing the labor pool.
It would mean less income for teachers that get summer jobs, at camps, at the family shore restaurant, etc.
It would reek havoc on working parents. When one’s child(ren) can be in camp for 8 or 9 weeks of 10 or 11 that they’re off from school that means only a week or so required to be out of the office for vacation. What would they do when kids are off for multiple three week breaks throughout the year?
It would also mean unproductive ‘learning’ time or worse, emergency cancellations when we get a heat wave in an unairconditioned brick & stone building w/o even good ventilation. Yes, the nearby big city school district cancelled classes multiple days in September, the first week of school because of an unusual late heat wave. That reeks havoc on parents work (& income) & businesses productivity when a number of employees need to leave early.