Educators propose to turn summer daze into school days

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 30, 1995 | by Stephen Goode

When the extra-quarter option at Parry McCluer first was offered in 1973, a quarter of the students at the school signed up; in 1994, 63 percent of the student body attended during the summer quarter, and during their four years in high school, 90 percent will have taken it at least one time.

Both programs, coincidentally, are in school districts made up largely of blue-collar families. Murfreesboro, population 45,000, ranks Nissan and Pillsbury among its major employers. Burlington, the carpet maker, is a leading employer in Buena Vista, population 7,000. For both towns, upgrading schools also was a way to fuel the local economy by creating and maintaining a working population attractive to big-time companies, Buena Vista and Murfreesboro school officials say.

Good news spreads. A team of observers from Japan visited Murfreesboro in the fall of 1994, and another from the Netherlands is slated for early 1995. One student at Parry McCluer expressed bewilderment at the number of reporters dropping by the school: He assumed all U.S. schools were open year-round.

Bookner says she hopes to extend Murfreesboro's programs to the city's high schools, which now close at 3 p.m. "School isn't important after that?" she asks, recalling a visit to one high school where "the doors were chained [at that time] for every student except the football team."

Says Bookner, "We've got to get our priorities right. Most kids aren't on the teams. They should be able to use the gym, the library for the pleasure of reading, even come to the cafeteria to sip cokes. I see a high school as a safe place to come where the teenage years can be something more than the time you get pregnant or use drugs."

RELATED ARTICLE: Telling Students 'About' Religion

A movement to promote teaching "about" religion in public school is gaining steam from a new guidebook for teachers, principals and parents, and its advocates hope it also may deflate the debate about school prayer.

The guide, which advises how to navigate issues such as school prayer, religious holidays and student Bible clubs, comes a decade after a new effort to make study of religion acceptable in schools.

"This work is going to bring a lot of light to a subject where there is mainly heat and smoke," says Steve McFarland, director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom of the Christian Legal Society in Annandale, Va.

Though the guide implicitly rejects the idea of a prayer amendment or even a moment of silence for prayer, it explains how to uphold student rights of religious expression and the respectful academic study of religion in various courses. Its solutions, presented mostly in a question-and-answer format, have been supported by such diverse groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Evangelicals.

The author of the guidebook, historian Charles Haynes, was among those in the mid-1980s who began to argue for teaching "about" religion as a way to include a spiritual dimension and imbue tolerance in Americans.