Yearly School Schedules

Here is another controversial topic for the Blog. I know that’s a big surprise! Yearly school schedules have been a heated topic for years. Here is a little background on the subject. The normal schedule used to be that school started the Tuesday after Labor Day and ended around the first week in June. Why? Well traditionally this was harvest time. Yes, I said harvest time. You know crops and stuff. So this was the schedule so the children could help on the farm during the growing season of summer. Well this schedule just kind of become the normal and stuck with us for years. Even when I was in high school we usually started the third Monday in August and got out for summer on the first Friday of June. Sometime about 7 years ago South Carolina began starting school earlier in August. We started on August the 7th this year and we still only get out on the last Friday in May. Why? Well here is why. Standardized testing takes place near the end of May so school districts decided that it would good to get in a little bit more time to get the students ready for the test. So the answer was to start earlier and earlier. This also allows the fall semester to end in high schools on a 4X4 block schedule before the winter break. So why don’t we get out three weeks earlier than we use to if we start three weeks earlier? The reason is the end of school is dictated by the standardized tests. So now we get a lot more holidays than we use too because the school year is still 190 days of classes. Here is a problem with this schedule. South Carolina’s main industry is tourism on the coast. The problem is that most of the cheap work force on the coast is high school students. So with the students going back to school at the beginning of August and the tourist season lasting until Labor Day, the tourist industry was suffering because they could not find enough people willing to work for minimum wage and they were losing money. So the solution...the most powerful political figures in South Carolina are from the coast so they passed a bill that would not allow any school district to start school before the third Monday in August. So again cheap child labor is influencing the school calendar. How can districts get around this? Year around school! In this schedule, the students get about a 2.5 week break every 9 weeks with one break that last a little longer. Educationally it makes good sense. The students have less of a chance to forget what they have learned over the long summer break. So what’s the problem? Here is a big word that has an influence over everything in education...TRADITION! What about summer family vacations? What about football? What about marching band? I am afraid that year around school may just be getting started. I would look for it to be a widely used schedule in the near future. Here is one thing for sure. You should at least have options and be prepared for change because it is coming!