School Isn’t Just for the Fall Anymore:

Year-round school is a suitable substitute for traditional schooling

By Alexis Megdanoff

Summer ends, school starts, and students ask,“We’re supposed to know this still?” With the way school in the United States currently operates, students are very likely to forget things during their three-month summer break. The obvious solution is to rearrange the school year into what has become known as year-round education (YRE).

In his 2014 State of the State address, Governor Rick Snyder proposed a program to help move schools from the traditional three-month summer schedule to year-round schooling, making the possibility of YRE more real as the needs of schools change from needing a harvest season to needing a way to help stop the loss of knowledge during summer break. Duke University Professor Harris Cooper conducted a research study to show how cutting a summer program would affect students. He found that students lost a possible one to three months of learning in math at worst and had little to no academic growth at best. By reducing the amount of time students are given between school years, the amount of forgotten material from the previous year will reduce, giving more time for learning and requiring less time for reviewing.

There are programs like summer school available to offer help to students who are struggling in academics, but students cannot immediately apply what they learn to their studies like they could in YRE. Frequent breaks during the YRE year would give those who need extra help more opportunity to apply their extra practice to their main education right away instead of waiting a month to begin learning again.

These added breaks during the school year also offer another opportunity: flexible vacation time. No longer would students have to miss two weeks of school just to hit the prime time for a special vacation, giving families the option to travel throughout the year.

Many might argue that the different schedule would have repercussions on sports and students who hold a job. There are many sports practices during the summer of a traditional school year; scheduling practices over breaks would not be any different than summer practices, and lots of students have jobs throughout the school year in traditional schooling, there would difference in YRE.

Education is changing. Year-round education is a new idea that needs to be put in place to keep improving the learning ability of students and secure a better future.

Prisoners of the Traditional School Year:

Why sitting on the beach is more fun than sitting at a desk in the summer

By Carly Riggs

Kids and adults alike are getting home from work and school. They run into bed or hop on the couch for some much needed relaxation. However one phrase can stop them dead in their tracks….year round school.

Thoughts of a summer ruefully slashed in half or even worse hot muggy days spent sticking to an uncomfortable desk raise the question, why have year round schooling?

Multi-track or year round schooling does not add more days to the school year, it just simply spreads out the school year. However the spread out days cut directly into the summer months that we love so much. Many teachers like the idea of year round school for many reasons, one of the main reasons is because students tend to forget material during their summer. Even if the break was shortened from two months to a month students, would still forget things from school; it’s difficult to remember everything we learn.

In Michigan, there are few schools with a year-round system, most are elementary schools. One reason why this system is more prevalent with elementary schools may be the issue of students’ summer jobs. Summer months are about fun, and the words fun and gas money usually go together. With school still in session, summer job opportunities would be much smaller due to the fact that some jobs would be going on during the school day, like life-guarding at the beach.

Year-round school is more expensive for the school to maintain than traditional school. Michigan might not have the hottest summers, but warm days are frequent. In order to have school during the summer, air conditioning would have to be put in.

As days get warmer, Fenton High also gets warmer inside the classrooms which means that more money would have to be put into getting air conditioning being installed throughout the building. Even with air conditioning, no one wants to show up to school in jeans and T-shirts when it’s 85 to 90 summer degrees outside.

Girls and guys alike will want to wear what is comfortable: shorts and tank top, which could possibly be dress code violations with the lengths of Along with all of the the shorts or the width of the tops.

Along with all of the previously noted inconveniences, the biggest one would be the fact that kids won’t want to go to school during the summer months. If too many students are absent, the day will not count and it would need to be made up during one of the shorter 15-day breaks.