Districts that school year-round: In a handful of systems, every school follows a year-long calendar - year-round schools

School Administrator, March, 2002 by Ann McGlynn

Robert Smotherman wanted to increase the quality of time students spent in classrooms in the Bardstown, Ky., school district. Changing the district's five schools to a year-round calendar seemed to be a logical route: Break up vacations into smaller pieces and offer remedial and enrichment activities during those shorter breaks.

He knew the man he had to convince was the varsity football coach in the "football-crazy town that we are, Smotherman notes. The new calendar, with its fall break and earlier start, could be perceived as a threat to the sport. He sent the head coach and his assistant to a seminar sponsored by the National Association for Year-Round Education, or NAYRE, in San Diego.

"They came back raving about this program, saying we ought to go here," says Smotherman, who now serves as NAYRE's president.

Nearly 10 years since the two football coaches traveled to the workshop on year-round schooling, the 1,800-student district located 40 miles southeast of Louisville has a higher ACT composite score, a higher percentage of seniors attending college, fewer discipline referrals to the office and a lower dropout rate.

Other factors besides the year-round calendar could have played a role, Smotherman concedes, but he is encouraged by what has happened in his school district. "We took a chance back then," he says. "We were afraid of losing kids, and money is kids. But we had done our homework and spent a lot of time looking at this thing. We finally decided to go and truly have never looked back."

Various Options

A year-round calendar shortens the summer break and increases the length of other breaks during the school year. Several variations of year-round calendars fit under two categories: multitrack and single-track.

A multitrack calendar generally breaks children into four groups. Three groups of children attend the school at any one time to allow a school to accommodate more students. A single-track calendar allows all children to attend the school at the same time. The fall and spring breaks generally are longer, the semester ends before the winter break and summertime is at least a couple of weeks shorter.

While roughly 3,000 individual schools have gone to a year-round calendar, fewer than a dozen school districts across the country have decided to change wholesale to the year-round calendar, according to NAYRE. Every school in those districts, from Bardstown to Rock Island, Ill., to Socorro, Texas, is on a year-round calendar.

Opposing Views

The year-round movement has strong proponents and opponents.

The NAYRE, the principal advocacy group, believes changing to a year-round calendar "minimizes learning loss that occurs during a typical three-month summer vacation." The organization's executive director, Marilyn Stenvall, says year-round scheduling is a trend that shows no signs of subsiding. But she also warns it is not easy to move a school or an entire district from a traditional calendar to a year-round calendar.

"It takes a lot of enthusiasm," Stenvall says. "It takes hard work. It's above and beyond your day job. If you're in education as an administrator to make a difference, this is the vehicle to do it with. There is a tremendous satisfaction that you can change a basic structure and meet the needs of kids."

However, a Texas-based organization known as Time to Learn believes year-round calendars are not the way to reform education. "Simply giving our children more of the same instruction, or at different times during the year, has not been the answer to educational woes," says Tina Bruno, the group's executive director. She questions whether year-round is growing as fast as NAYRE and other boosters claim it is.

"Calendars don't teach kids, teachers do," says Bruno, executive director of Time to Learn. "There are a lot of other ways to improve education."

Voluminous research supports both positions, the NAYRE and Time to Learn contend. They serve as clearinghouses for studies that further their respective stances in hopes of influencing school boards and other policymakers.

District Examples

NAYRE cites the stories of districts that decided to place all their schools on a year-round plan:

* Socorro Independent School District, which serves the eastern portion of Texas, as well as two communities along the Mexican border. The district went year-round in 1990 to help ease overcrowding in a district that has doubled its enrollment in the past decade. The school district, with 28 schools, now is considered a recognized district in the state, the second highest designation the Texas Education Agency bestows on a school district based on student test scores.

* Valley View School District in Romeoville, Ill., is believed to be the first district in the United States to go entirely year-round when it made the switch in 1970. District officials decided to return to a traditional calendar in the district's schools when its enrollment declined and the district no longer needed year-round education to fit all of the students into its buildings. The district has 18 schools.