The Endless Summer? Not for Children in Year-Round School

The 85,000 fans at Auburn University’s Jordan-Hare Stadium were engrossed in the football game--final score: Tennessee 17, Auburn 9--when a plane droned overhead, toting a banner.

Some who looked up were probably perplexed; they had come to see the Tigers and Volunteers play, and they did not know about the nastier battle raging nearby.

“STOP YEAR ROUND SCHOOL IN AUBURN,” the banner read.

For months, Auburn, Ala., was embroiled in a free-for-all over when its kids would go to school, and when not. There were accusations of threats and sabotage; there were voices raised and tears shed.

All because of summer vacations.

Or, more specifically, because of plans to rearrange school days so that the traditional summer break--long and lazy days of baseball, beachcombing and the like--would be reduced or eliminated.

Last year, for the first time, more than 2 million American kids attended some form of year-round school. There are 2,957 such schools in 43 states, according to the National Assn. for Year-Round Education.

In many cases, school calendars are changed in response to population growth; by running schools all year, districts can pack in more students and postpone building new schools.

Reducing Learning Loss by Shortening Summer

But this was not the case in Auburn. There and elsewhere, educators have advocated year-round schools because they fervently believe they are better.

Kids, they say, forget a lot over the summer, and teachers are forced to spend September and October reviewing the previous year’s work.

“More and more educators are doubting the wisdom of long summer vacation,” says Charles Ballinger, executive director of the National Assn. for Year-Round Education. “One way to reduce summer learning loss is to reduce summer.”

The problem, say his opponents, is that there’s no evidence that year-round schools are an improvement, and the new calendars wreak havoc on the lives of children and their families.

So while some districts have made the transition to a year-round calendar quietly, others--like Paradise, Calif.; Bentonville, Ark.; South Brunswick, S.C.; and Auburn-- have gone to war.

Defenders of summer vacation say educators use steamroller tactics. Billee Bussard, former editorial writer for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, says she has “never encountered a group of people in education who use more deceptive and underhanded means.”

Current Calendar a Rural, Urban Mix

Year-round-school supporters, meanwhile, say their opponents are aided by the vacation and camp industry, which is fearful of what a calendar change would do to their business. This is true.

And they say that we are being held hostage to the days when an agrarian calendar dictated when kids would go to school.

This is only partly true.

In the 19th century, there were basically two school calendars. In cities, students attended class 48 weeks a year, while farm areas had six months off during the growing season. The current calendar is a compromise, born of the meeting of country and city.

Still, Bluffton, Iowa, tried year-round schools in 1904. Newark, N.J., had a 48-week schedule from 1912 to 1931; the summers were voluntary.

But the Depression brought an end to Newark’s experiment and to all year-round schools--at least until the 1960s, when the baby boom and suburban growth filled schools to the brim.

By 1985, more than 350,000 kids were in year-round public schools; by 1992, the number topped 1.3 million. Now the total is 2,063,217.

Stevenson Ranch Elementary School, north of Los Angeles, was built four years ago to house 550 students; the day it opened, it had 730. It now has 1,420, many of them housed in portable classrooms.

In 1998, the Newhall School District went to a multitrack, year-round system. There are four tracks--red, yellow, blue and green. Each attends school for 60 school days, or 12 weeks, and then breaks for four weeks; one-quarter of the school is always on vacation.

Mostly, the changeover has been smooth. Not that it’s uncomplicated. When a school is in session all year, you can’t hold one back-to-school night--you must hold two. Repairs are made while students are there.

Victoria Tenney is on the blue track, which means she is in school until her break in September.

But Victoria swims competitively. Swimming is a summer thing, so she must balance swimming and sixth-grade schoolwork. She’s also the student council president, and had to come in from vacation for the first meeting of the year.

Teachers like Penni Perrault say they like the schedule. Her first- graders at nearby Newhall Elementary School “are always fresh. The teachers are always fresh.”

“I actually ended up liking it, and I didn’t think I would,” says Catherine Robbins. Her son, Kristopher Konrath, is a blue-track sixth-grader at Stevenson Ranch. “Actually, it’s kind of cool. . . . Disneyland is less crowded. Air fares are cheaper.”

In Room 116, Sarah Striblen’s sixth-grade class generally has good things to say about the year-round schedule.

“You get different seasons off,” says Blake Fullmer.

“Your minds grow,” says Sarah Abbott.

And yet if you ask them to vote, they favor that traditional calendar by more than 2 to 1. “You look forward to getting off for summer break because you’re off for such a long time,” says Sunny Renkow.

Newhall tried year-round schools a few years ago, but “caved” when parents grumbled, superintendent Marc Winger says. This time, “they didn’t open it up and let the opposition get rolling. That may have been a smart move.”

Especially when you consider what happened in Auburn.

“I’ve never seen such meanness,” says Suzanne Freeman, assistant superintendent of schools.

With 4,000 students, Auburn is not overcrowded. But the number of poor children had increased from 20% to 37% over seven years, and educators believed these kids would benefit from shortened breaks.

At the same time, educators said, teachers and high school students were exhausted and needed more frequent vacations.

They thought year-round schools might help--though on a single track, to keep all kids on the same schedule.

Educators were “pushing it really, really hard,” says David Elton, a professor at Auburn University and father of five.

So he and some colleagues began pushing back. They met each week. Three or four guys put up most of the money--a total of $10,000, Elton says--to rent a meeting room at the bank or library, to buy radio and television ads, to launch the banner over the game on Oct. 3, 1998.

Some cash went to print 1,500 “Stop YRS” signs. These were to be planted in front yards, but the other side would “drive around and pull the signs out,” says Steve Kempf of the Stop Year Round Schools group.

The year-rounders tell a different story. Freeman says 53 people were on the committee that studied the calendar. They met for over a year and held 10 town meetings, some of them heated.

No one, she insists, was trying to bulldoze anybody--except perhaps the opponents of change, who unleashed a blizzard of e-mail and letters to the editor. “We were called liars, cheaters,” she says.

One writer likened Freeman to “Cruella DeVil, driving around with children locked in the back of her car, screaming to get out.”

Freeman says one caller even told her husband, “Your wife better stop because we will go after her in any way we can.”

As a college town, Auburn has an unusual proportion of adults who do not work during the summer--and they wanted their kids off then too.

But other arguments were more typical of disputes elsewhere. Say vacation falls during football season--”The football coach isn’t going to give you a two-week break,” Elton says.

(For this very reason--and because marching bands also are tied to football season--most districts limit year-round calendars to elementary grades. This breeds complications, of course, when some families have kids on different schedules.)

The critics say year-round schools lead to administrative burnout and make it hard for teachers to receive extra training.

Summer Recreation Industry Weighs In

These are not insurmountable problems, say the year-rounders. And they say that districts on year-round schedules can set up special programs during breaks for kids who need or want extra schooling (though many districts can’t afford it, or lack teachers).

The critics also argue that opportunities for work, education and play in the summer are not there at other times.

“Most young people do not attend camp,” rejoins Ballinger, of the year-round group. “They’re out there--unsupervised, unoccupied and unemployed, if they’re old enough.”

Some of the opposition, he says, “is financed by the summer recreation industry”--the International Assn. of Amusement Parks and Attractions.

In 1994 it established Time to Learn, which opposes year-round schools. Chris Fleming, the group’s vice president, acknowledges that the recreation industry has a vested interest in the issue.

But she insists that doesn’t matter. What matters, she says, is that year-round schools are a bad idea.

“Children need to be working during the summer, to pay for college,” she says. “Or they’re taking advantage of other learning opportunities. There’s so much more to learn outside of the classroom.”

Time to Learn even opposes year-round calendars to relieve overcrowding. Postponing inevitable construction just increases costs, it says.

Elton says Time to Learn helped very little in Auburn; it sent a videotape “that wasn’t too useful.” No, he says, the debate in Auburn came down to whether a change would do more harm than good.

“I didn’t think we should make a change to something that wasn’t proven,” says Kempf, an associate professor of zoology at Auburn University and father of a 12-year-old boy.

Gene V. Glass, associate dean for research at Arizona State University’s College of Education, has studied year-round schools since the 1970s. His opinion?

“I’ve never seen any evidence anywhere that kids learn any better when you spread out the days they go to school--180 days turns out to be 180 days, no matter how you slice it,” he says.

Elizabeth A. Palmer, project director for the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, looked at current research on year-round schools and found that most of it wasn’t very good. What was left showed “no significant effect on achievement.”

Even Ballinger admits, “We don’t guarantee that there will be improvement, but there are no studies out there that indicate that they will do worse.”

So why do they do it? Because they believe.

“The principles are quite solid,” Palmer says; year-round schools appeal to “people’s sense of what works.”

“The question everyone should ask is not, ‘Why have year-round school?’ ” insists Daniel A. Domenich, superintendent of Fairfax County, Va., schools, “but ‘Why not have year-round school?’ ”

Ridiculous, says David Elton.

“The way an administrator enhances his job position is by doing something different than they had done before,” he says. “Women’s hemlines change, right? They go up and down. It’s the same with education.”

Elton can now look at the issue from a distance. After what Freeman, the assistant superintendent of schools, describes as four months of “pure hell,” year-round schools were defeated.

“We all learn by experience,” the author Peter de Vries once wrote, “but some of us have to go to summer school.”

Of course, de Vries probably never visited Auburn, Ala.