Time to Update the School Year
The pandemic is a new reminder of the urgent need for adaptation. It’s an instructive push to open minds to impactful change.
The fall of 2021 looks more promising than it did a year ago in terms of actual time in school classrooms for our K-12 children. Our middle and high school children can be vaccinated and we are told that soon our younger students will also be able to access the vaccine.
Yet there is an uneasiness among parents and educators. This nervousness is particularly acute for parents of elementary school children, who worry that open schools won’t stay that way if the virus continues to morph and grow in vaccine-resistant ways. It could be that remote learning will now be a regular part of our toolkit for educating the youngest society members. This reality is causing educators to pivot, to innovate, and to imagine new ways of guiding our children to discover new content and to master the basics they will need for their futures.
There is still a mindset that the current situation is temporary and there will be a return to traditional physical school in some way. Yet we are headed into our third school year requiring educators to adapt to the virus. Maybe it’s time to move beyond small tweaks to wholesale changes that acknowledge the reality of what we have learned, and set our schools up for better outcomes no matter what lies ahead.
It is time to consider changing the K-12 school calendar to acknowledge that we can educate our children more safely outdoors in the summer than we can indoors in the winter.
We could spread nine months of school across our warmest months and break during the winter. It may be time to move away from our traditional fall-to-spring model, which was historically implemented to allow children who live on farms to help with the annual harvest. This may have made sense in the past. Today, though, we know that educating children outdoors with open airflow (i.e., in open-air tents) or in classrooms with open windows creates the best conditions for lowering disease transmission.
What if we schooled our K-12 kids every month but November, December and January, instead of June, July and August? Perhaps schools might operate in February – October with a holiday break in late fall and/or early winter? Or we could move to a full school year with 3–4-week break periods throughout the year? Evidence shows that more in-time school reduces summer learning loss and provides a stronger safety net for our those most in need for more in-person school time.
There are other potential upsides: first, attendance rates might improve for both children and educators if they didn’t attend school during the traditional cold and flu season; second, school facilities might see energy savings by not operating in the winter months and thus lower operational costs; and, third, changing the academic calendar might create more alignment with the outside world and open up new opportunities for internships, apprenticeships, and outside-of-school relevant work experiences.
The September – June school year is very ingrained for each of us because its what we generally experienced. Yet we are the ones we’ve been waiting for -- parents and families of school aged children and educators need to be the ones calling for consideration of these types of structural changes that now seem more pragmatic in the light of a deadly pandemic.
We know that changes would need to happen across the state or in regions of the state because one of the major impediments is having schedules line up in neighboring districts so sports and extracurricular activities that involve competition can be managed. But wouldn’t baseball and softball seasons be much more enjoyable in July than in our traditional rainy Oregon April?
It would also require the community to be willing to adapt to a new plan – to tuck away that coveted summer vacation – and re-imagine our own lives on a different schedule. This has proven to be too significant of an obstacle in other places at other times. But the pandemic is a new reminder of the urgent need for adaptation. It’s an instructive push to open minds to impactful change.
As a parent of a tween, I can add to this debate that summer vacation feels like a very inequitable time to me. My child’s summer is filled with a patchwork of camps that occupy her time so that I can continue to work full-time. Many cannot afford camps and enrichment activities so what are those children doing with their time? Early work experiences, hanging out in their neighborhoods, and other activities may consume their days. What if in addition to changing our traditional school year we could imagine school breaks to provide open access to enrichment and early work experiences for all? It could be the start of a much more robust and relevant exposure for our littles to the world in which they will live, work ,and play as they mature going forward.
Like so many ideas in the world of education change, this conversation should be led by educators around what is needed to best teach and challenge our children. What we can each do is raise the question and create a supportive environment for innovating beyond where we stand today – for considering bigger changes that could mitigate our current threats and create different learning paths for the future.
"Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B" by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Thanks to climate change, we cannot assume pleasant weather in Oregon during the summer anymore. If we change the school break to be in the winter instead of the summer, then schools that can afford air conditioning will simply spend less money on heating and more on air conditioning. For schools that cannot afford air conditioning, the students will sweat and suffer in over-heated schools. From an equity point of view, if the state pays to air condition all schools, then having school during the summer would at least give children too poor to afford AC a cool place to go.
As far as having some sort of camp/work/enrichment activity available outside of the academic year, that sounds great. The question is whether the taxpayers will fund it. They should since they will save the money that they would have spent on the patchwork of camps, but voters are not always rational. -David Yokoyama-Martin
Sue, your piece prompts other thoughts about connecting what we've done to cope with the pandemic to longer term changes in our education system. One thought: We should explore a combination of on-line teaching and learning concentrated in the winter months with more in-person learning and activities in the summer months.
It seems to me that the biggest obstacle to scheduling changes of this kind is managing parental work schedules. Working parents cope with summers off for their kids now -- often with inequitable and negative consequences for learning, as you point out. It's how they cope that's the problem. Would less extended time off for kids, in more frequent but shorter periods, be any harder to manage for working parents than what we do now? We know it would be better for the kids. But we haven't applied much thought to the parental side of things and to the role of employers in managing their own time off and scheduling practices.