From Washoe County in Nevada to the Seaford School District in Delaware, many schools are switching from a traditional calander over to a new balanced school calender. The switch would shorten summer break and move those days into other periodic breaks during the school year. Should Montgomery County consider making the change as well? The Warrior debates what the next move should be.

New Calendar Would Minimize Burnout- Pro

by Jack Armstrong ‘15

Before you get the wrong idea, adopting a balanced calendar does not mean more days of school. Rather, a balanced calendar focuses on evenly distributing breaks during the school year, while the number of school days remains the same.

A balanced calendar would help improve student learning and classroom achievement and address issues such as summer learning loss, “burnout” and stress. MCPS should look into adopting a balanced calendar as a solution for all schools to boost academic achievement.

The balanced calendar shortens summer break and redistributes those days throughout the year during fall, winter and spring breaks, each typically being 3 weeks long. Summer break is still the longest, but is shortened to around 4-5 weeks.

The benefit of a balanced calendar is that it minimizes “burnout” because breaks are longer and more frequent throughout the year. The balanced calendar is also designed to reduce learning loss over summer break, so less time is spent reteaching and more is spent on new learning. In fact, under the balanced calendar, the fall semester ends before winter break, rather than having two more weeks of school and exams remaining after break, such as under the current calendar.

Washoe County Schools in Nevada voted to implement the balanced calendar in for the 2013-2014 school year. In a report provided by Washoe County Schools, parent and student attitudes toward the balanced calendar after one year were positive, with 73.3 percent of students and 77.6 percent of parents and staff favoring  the new calendar. The school system reports the main reason they made the jump was to maximize student learning and achievement by shortening summer break to reduce learning loss and balance break time. Feedback gathered prior to the implementation showed an interest to change the calendar mainly because the community requested a later start date, leading to an investigation into the benefits of adopting a balanced calendar.

A balanced calendar makes sense not only because it focuses on improving students’ education, but because it helps to improve underperforming schools by rethinking how a school calendar is related to achievement. It provides new winter intercession programs for students during winter break, replacing summer school programs in the traditional system. Though some remain skeptical of how such a change would disrupt the community, many educators argue there is a solid link between student achievement and more frequent breaks included in a balanced calendar. Proof of the balanced calendar’s success can be seen in numerous counties across the nation today.

Year-Long School Would Cause Disruption- Con

by Brian Hughes ‘15

While longer breaks during the school year might seem nice for students and learning, the balanced school calendar would ultimately do more harm than good. Arguments for this growing trend focus on reducing the amount of material students forget over a long summer break while also limiting the amount of stress students experience with long streaks of consecutive weeks of school. These are valid to a certain degree, but the downsides to the new calendar largely outweigh any perceived benefits.

Longer breaks realistically will counter the intentions of the balanced calendar: which is to be less disruptive to students by reducing the lengthy break from June to September. However, longer breaks throughout the school year would not result in minimizing that disruption. If anything, extending Spring Break and Winter Break would be more disruptive, removing students from the classroom during the school year for multiple, longer periods of time rather than just having one large break in the summer. That learning loss is just put into the time in which the other breaks that take place rather than in the summer.

There are also students’ parents to think about, especially the parents of younger students. When their kids are off for an extra week or two during the winter and spring, parents likely will not get to take off for those extra days as well – they need to go back to work. Also, elementary schools provide sources of transportation to aftercare centers for students who have working parents and are not available; that transportation will be lost when students are not at school. Also, a new balanced calendar is not going to coincide with traditional holidays. Where is the “balance” here? The calendar is more disruptive both in and out of school.

Another less-considered but still important factor is the cost of having to keep schools in motion year round since there is not a period of time long enough to fully reduce energy use when schools are empty.  A school is going to increase its energy use (and cost) as a result. Heat, air conditioning, lights and computers all contribute to that cost, and we all know that money comes from taxes.

Bottom line, a balanced school calendar is not really balanced at all. There is a reason there are movies, books and even songs based on summer vacation. It has just become a societal norm that we seem to function around just fine, with short, periodic breaks in between so that we may enjoy the holidays. The world beyond schools, specifically the lives of parents, does not need to be put out of sync so students can forget what they learn during weeks off in the winter and spring rather than just in the summer.