Year-Round School Benefits

Since the beginning of formalized education, children everywhere are educated for months at a time, and are then released for a break to allow children to rest, over the summer. This method of education, is an invention of the past that is now unneeded in today’s society. Historian Kenneth Gold, explains that the invention of summer vacation was based on an outdated belief that, “too much schooling impaired a child’s and a teacher’s health.” Gold continues explaining on how community leaders in the 19th century also fretted over how that the season of summer was a “period of epidemics and most fruitful of diseases generally,” forcing students to spend the entire season of summer in their homes, away from cramped and generally overheated schools.

He also suggests that year-round school could also boost learning for children with learning disabilities, and children with English as their second language. Furthermore, the principal at Piedmont Elementary, a year-round school operating in Charleston, Virginia, Beth Sturgill, explains how year-round school aids students in poverty. “There’s a lot of families that sometimes we have concerns and we like to check in with and make sure that everything’s going well, and just to have that consistent flow without having that long summer break helps.” With schools unable to contact high-risk families during the summer, teachers and staff at schools often spend the majority of the summer worrying on if students will make it back into the classroom. But with year-round schools, staff and teachers have no need to worry about such things. With a consistent, constant calender, students aren’t gone for more than a month at a time, allowing teachers and staff to freely check in on students’, and their families’ safety. But for some parents, it’s the opposite case. Some parents believe that with a consistent pattern of school with shortened summer vacations, they believe that their children will spend the rest of their school days strained with little to no rest, unstabilizing their school lifestyle and eventually breaking these students. However, this is not the case. What most parents against year-round school don’t realize, is how these year-round schools operate. According to authors Charles Ballinger and Carolyn Kneese schools vary on the way their year-round schools operate. But all of these schools run on a type of schedule known as a “Single Track Calendar” Each of these schools run on a variety of single tracks, some examples include 45/15, 60/20, 60/15, 90/30 or a mix of these for. The first