I guess this question is for both parents and students alike. YMMV, but aren’t the sessions about 3 months long and then a 2 week break? Tell me if you are for/against it,
but tell me why. We only have one child to deal with, so it won’t be a big scheduling hassle with different tracks and so forth. It is still in the works in our school district, so information is scarce. Moderators, please move this OP as you deem appropriate, I wasn’t sure where to place it.
The system I am student teaching at is semi-year round, and I love it. We start school the first week of August, go for 9 weeks, take two weeks off, go for 9 weeks, take two weeks off (no change there-Xmas), go for 9 weeks, take two weeks off (spring break + one week), go for 9 weeks, take two months off (June and July). This way you still get the long summer (2 months is plenty), but you can take vacations in the fall, when the weeather is so nice. Furhtermor, teachers get 2 weeks off at the end of every grading period to tie up lose ends and do long term planning.
I would be in favor of ANYTHING new, any change that would shake things up in public education. Year 'round school is an idea whose time has come. It’s so silly that we are still running school on an agricultural calendar.
My son just started kindergarten with the year round schedule. So far, we like it. He started in August and went to school for nine weeks. He then had three weeks off in October, and returns to school this Tuesday. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but now that I’m getting used to it, it doesn’t seem so bad.
One of the reasons I do like it is that my family likes to travel and we can plan our trips around the weeks that he is off instead of cramming everything into a weekend.
I, for one, would love it. I go bonkers over the summer in boredom, and am strung out the rest of the year. By staggering these breaks and work periods, it’d let me rest without getting enormously bored. It’d also preserve my handwriting, study habits and sleep schedule.
Trying to remember back a few years…
I remember the year being broken down into 6 2-month sessions. Everyone went attended 4 months, then was off two, then went another 4, etc. As a result you had 2/3rds of the kids in school at any given time and 1/3rd off on vacation. As my schedule worked out I was off August & September, then February & March. It was great. (actually I think it worked out to something more like 14 weeks on, 7 weeks off, with Xmas & Easter weeks off for everyone)
I thought it was great - I got time for both summer and winter sports. I was a sucky skier, but who cared?
A practical consideration…how about students/teachers (OK, I’m thinking solely of myself, a teacher, here) who really need a longish string of weeks off in order to do summer work and make some money? That might be a problem of going a few weeks on, then a couple weeks off, year round.
(Granted, summer jobs are not as important to either students or teachers as is school, but they are a necessity in many cases.)
If I didn’t have this concern, I really think I’d like the year-round system, which has been discussed (but never seriously) where I am. Now the 4-day (rather than 5-day) school week I could really get behind…
One thing to take into consideration is whether or not air conditioning is available in the schools. Here in Cincinnati, where the summers can be fairly brutish, there is no A/C in many of the schools. This would make for a fairly large investment before this would be practical.
As far as year round school, as a parent I would mostly be for it. However there may be sometimes where I want to take my family overseas for a month or two, and this would be limiting in that case.
Aside: one thing I found kind of cool in Germany was that each state staggered their school breaks which made vacation time less crowded, rather than a run on hotels during the winter break, for example. The downside of this is that it may be difficult to synch up vacation with my sibs who live in different states and may not have the same breaks.
hmm…it’s actually a nice idea-NOT! esp. in taiwan, where i would have to sit thru a HOT and HUMID summer. even a/cs dont work. so i’d rather prefer the system i have and go visit a much cooler place in the summer. pleasthink of the sub-tropical and tropicals regions, will ya? North America isnt the only place on earth
oops…i got carried away.