May Days!

May Days!

Across much of the nation, such words are uttered from student, teacher, and parent alike.  With mere days of school left for millions of Americas, a brew of emotions percolate.  It is a mixture of stress, anticipation, apathy and giddiness, none of which, if we are honest with ourselves, are suited to the task of educating our young people.

We can almost fix, this, though, if we simply remove what makes us all giddy in the first place:  summer vacation. 

Now, I realize this is a dangerous idea at any time of the year, and is especially so right now.  Considering I will spend much of this week surrounded by exhausted high school students and their wearier teachers, I might wear a helmet. 

However, let’s face it.  No task is suited to walking away from it for eleven weeks.  It’s dumb.  Besides that, the nine month school calendar was developed when America was a mostly agrarian society.  Although we can still consider ourselves the breadbasket of the world, very few of us actually still make the bread.  According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, only two percent of Americans actually still live on a farm or ranch.  Why, then, do we still operate schools as if large chunks of our youth are needed as manual labor for three months at a time?

Education is a process, and stalling that process for almost three months seriously impedes that effort.  The edges of our school calendar are frayed.  August and even much of September is spent reviewing while May is often seen by many students as a joke.  Instead of discussing the merits of year round schooling, though, let’s instead consider the arguments against it.

Some might ask the question, “how would we organize extracurricular activities?” After all, scheduling events with other schools is already an arduous task.   Keep in mind, though, that many sports are already a year-round investment.  Students do not have to be in attendance to be in sports.  Students are often not in school already while they are participating in school-sponsored activities.  Think about holiday basketball tournaments, for example.  Think about summer practices or camps.  The idea that the sports calendar runs parallel to the school calendar is a mirage, anyway.  After all, many athletes will still be competing after graduation, while many sports begin before the school year even starts.

For some, the sanctity of the summer family vacation is cited as a good reason to keep the school year as is, but an entire calendar should not be influenced by the traveling habits of a minority of people. Family vacations are great. I love family vacations, but I would love them whether are not they are in the summer.  I would probably, in fact, love them better in the fall or spring, when many destinations feel less like a swamp.

Besides that, keep in mind that “year-round school” does not mean fifty-two weeks of actual attendance.  Breaks would still exist, but they would be dispersed more evenly in two or three week segments.  The sabbatical surrounding Independence Day, for example, could be weeks instead of months, which would be much more conducive to education in the first place.  This point, actually, leads us to a final argument against year-round schooling:  increased cost.

 If a school district decided to implement year-round school and actually added school days to the calendar, then it would stand to reason that the budget for salaries would also need to reflect that increase.  However, I am not arguing for more time in front of students.  Trust me.  I am simply advocating for a more logical scheduling of that time.

Year-round schooling would not, of course, fix everything, and it may even bring headaches of its own.  Regardless, we can make May a much better month for learning, and, as much as it pains me to write this, we could start by going to school in June.