With Senate Bill 81, Senator Kruse proposes prohibiting a school corporation from beginning the school year prior to Labor Day. The school year could not extend past June 15 of the year.
I don’t know how the math works out, but personally I’d shoot for beginning on the last Monday in August and ending by the first Friday in June. I guess that’s about a week shift from what Sen. Kruse is proposing.
Forget it – the kids need to go year round, with several 2 week breaks spread out among holidays and such. 200+ days a year too.
We have a school calendar that’s been grandfathered in from our agrarian roots. Times have changed and its time we moved our education up a priority or two.
Didn’t I read recently that schools that have gone year round are not seeing any educational benefits. They are, however, seeing a huge increase in costs to run the school all year. I can’t remember the source at all, but I’m sure I read it.
180 days are required now and isn’t working so why would 200? If the parents don’t care the kids won’t care. And if the kids don’t care they could be in school 260 days a year (52 weeks/5 days a week) and still fail. My kids could succeed with 140 days because they aqre forced to – by me, my wife, their grandparents, etc.
A good example would be myself. You could place me in a Literature class right now for 200 days a year. At the end of 200 days I will know no more about literature than I do right now because I don’t care the least bit about literature. That’s how kids view the world today – if they don’t think it’s important to them then they don’t work at it. If the parents didn’t give them the option of whether they could decide for themselves what is or is not important then the problem would be solved.
I would like to go back to the from Labor Day to Memorial day schedule.
I’m on the opposite camp from Dave.
Our kids will have their entire adult lives to have their fun milked out of them and turned into GDP.
Let’s at least let them have the first 1/4 of their lives designed with some built-in time of having fun, or watching a whole day get wasted. It might bring them some comfort when they’re working the 50 hour weeks that are demanded now, or 60 hour weeks that are demanded by the time they grow up.
I can’t imagine that we’d invest in pumping more information into these children if we didn’t plan on extracting it later.
As a former high school teacher, I prefer the mid August – end of May schedule that many school districts have adopted and that Sen. Kruse opposes.
1) Starting in August allows students to get in a full semester (18 weeks) before winter break. High school students and teachers don’t have semester assignments and finals to worry about over the break, and everyone gets a fresh start with the new year.
2) Students who graduate after the first semester of their senior year may begin attending college in January rather than waiting until the summer or the following August. As the line between college and high school continues to blur with joint high school/college credit programs with Ivy Tech and other institutions, having a schedule that aligns with colleges and universities becomes even more relevant.
3) Many districts have received waviers for balanced calendars. (Still 180 days, Jason, but school is spread our more evenly across the year with more and shorter breaks.) There is some decent research that indicates that a balanced calendar increases student achievement. In addition, the schedule is very popular in some communities. If we are offering waivers for “year round” and balanced calendars, should the state be dictating the schedule at all?
4) I have seen no research that indicates that the schedule Sen. Kruse advocates improves student achievement or any other education goals.
5) In the case of Indiana, I think the tourism argument is pretty flimsy. As I understand it, fall is our big tourism season.
I with Dave…year-round school. The number of “instructional” days doesn’t change all that much, if any. Just where the breaks fall.
Most of my ire is over the idea of increasing days. Year-round or not can be more of a personal decision. Trimesters don’t offend me as much, since they would also have pretty long breaks in them.
I just resist the idea of turning children into full-time student employees. I’ve already noticed the increase in homework hours.
It is already getting to the point that I want to know how any athletic director that is also a health teacher can do their job & look in the mirror. 15-18 year old people should get 9.5 hours of sleep, yet that number can not happen when they have weeknight games and 4 hours of homework. Even the practice requirements of some sports leave students unable to get the rest their body needs.
I too question the value of excessive and irrelevant homework. Far too many people (including teachers) mistakenly equate the amount of homework with academic rigor.
Our elementary children go to a year round cycle school. We love it! Our school year typically starts around july 20th and ends June 5. They go 9 weeks on 3 weeks off and 5 weeks for summer. It is the same amount of days and lemme tell you at around the 8 week mark of the 9 weeks somehow we all are ready for a break and viola 3 weeks of leisure…not to mention great times to vacation. 2 days before winter was over my 7 year old announced she missed her teacher and couldnt wait to go back..whadayaknow she’s ready and happy to be back. Personally I love it!
As far as cost- yes it is more expensive to be on a yr round cycle- heating, cooling and busses.. but the children do retain more.
For me the fact that my kids actually look forward to school and learning makes it worth it.
I’m not opposed to changing the school calendar, but it seems that so many summer activities are geared toward kids being out of school for a large block of time.
Maybe year round school works, but some of my fondest memories are from having weeks off to explore and play in the summer. Wild strawberries for a leisurely breakfast, packing a lunch to eat in the woods, watching small planes and gliders fly over and sometimes do tricks, staying up late to watch thousands of lightning bugs, feeding horses, playing with toads, sitting on the front porch late at night and watching the lightning from distant thunderstorms, staying inside and drawing cartoons or doing word puzzles on rainy days.
All of those things and so much more were another sort of education–one I am glad to have had. No way we could have done those things if there had been year round school.
I had another thought yesterday…actually my dad brought it up. He attends the Labor Day auction at Auburn every year – the same auction owned by the Kruse’s.
I never go because school has started and my wife (a teacher) and kids don’t want due to school just starting.
Maybe he has some incentive to free up a weekend for a lot of people to not be in school yet.
Kruse should get a lot of push-back from student athletes’ parents. Those kids start practice around Aug. 1 so they have to be around. They might get 6 weeks of summer break if they’re lucky.
I would also imagine that except for the very small districts the athletic director who is still teaching classes is pretty rare. They have an unbelievable amount of work to do.
A school district in KY went to a 4 day week rather than remove time at the beginning/end of the year. From what I’ve read, this schedule is liked by students, teachers, and administrations. It reduces cost and student/teacher burnout.
I like the 4 day week. I haven’t seen any schools doing it, but I work with a lot of county highways that use 4 day weeks and there productivity increase is tremendous. Several of my clients have actually calculated their increased production vs their decrease in expenditures.