It’s about time this is studied. As far as I know, most of the kids attending school no longer help work the farms.
Where’s the Crozet focus of this story? Our legislator is suggesting the study.
Why we should get rid of summer vacation .
Year-Round School?
Well there really isn’t a need for a study. We all know full well that Albemarle, the State, or the Feds don’t have the tax revenue to pay for it. And given our representatives’ inability to tax at a rate that covers current expenses or reduce spending that leaves selling bonds. I can’t imagine that anyone will buy bonds to pay for day to day school operations. Good luck with your study Del. Landes, and let your constituents know next time you visit this side of the mountain.
You are right. There is no need for a study. Year round schools are already available for parents that want to invest this way in their children.
As far as the funds issue, I would hate to see how much this study will actually cost. Alot of the people that are in Richmond now are totally out of ideas and keep rehashing things to keep themselves in the news. We term limit the Governor. It is time that the rest of them leave with him when he goes…
It is hard to believe that this has gotten so little discussion. I have long been interested in the possibility of year round schooling, but for very few reasons listed in the article. As an educator, I think it would be wonderful to have that long break divided more evenly over the year. For example, what would two week fall and spring breaks look like? They are wonderful times to be outside and wonderful times to take family vacations. With shorter breaks, students wouldn’t have the opportunity to forget so much information like they do over the summer. Certainly a nice two or three week break during the summer would be nice in the summer time, but would not contribute to the long loss of knowledge. I agree that parents who use the summer to take their children on extended trips, use the summer for extended reading time, or use the summer for educational summer camps will have children who have not lost as some less fortunate. However, most parents will not cover all the academic areas and there will be some loss of knowledge by the time school begins in late summer.
I will acknowledge that there are some disadvantages of year round schooling that people who don’t work in the public school system might not know about. First of all, educators use the summer to take course work for advanced degrees and relicensing course work while they don’t have the pressures of having typical preparation and grading to do. Secondly, most school districts use the summer time to do their smaller remodeling and cleaning jobs. Some of our county schools are used morning, noon, and night all school year long and those extensive jobs could be difficult to complete with shortened holidays. Finally, the local travel economy could indeed suffer. This could mean loss of jobs or more seasonal jobs would not exist. Our local summer camps would take a huge hit and would probably no longer exist as such.
Now my final challenge to my fellow Crozetians. Please let us enjoy the loving spirit of the holiday and agree to disagree. Mudslinging and making personal comments is just plain poor manners and detracts from the spirit of the blog. I request that we call a truce for all future comments.
Professional Commenter – Thank you for pointing out some of the disadvantages; I had thought of a couple of those but not the potential loss of summer camps. Do you think that they could restructure to offer seasonal camps?
Along the lines of thinking differently about education, I highly recommend this TED talk, How to Learn? From Mistakes.
I think it would be very difficult to staff those camps. A place like ACAC or Triple C begin searching in January for good summer employees. There is no way that college students would be able to take off two weeks or more here and there to come to work. I doubt that there would be enough adults locally to fill those positions. I know that ACAC has about a week of required training for their employees before the campers arrive their first week of summer break including first aid, CPR, in addition to TB tests. There is actually a lot of training to meet state requirements that the average person doesn’t realize exist.
In reply to RRK below, each county and city in the commonwealth establish their own school calendars. What works in Fluvanna may or may not work in another location. Here locally, the city and county maintain fairly consistent calendars because of CATEC. That may be the reason that Fluvanna did not include their high school in their year round schooling. I think that they too have students attending CATEC, but I could be mistaken about that.
In a year round school calendar, there is a summer break for about six weeks. The summer break would be approximately June 15-Aug 25. My sister’s kids attended year round school and it only applied to elementary school students.
I live in Crozet, not Fluvanna County. As a matter of fact I have lived in Crozet for my entire life. I am a former Albemarle Co. elementary school teacher and I am well aware of how the county and city try to co-ordinate the school year calendar. I am also aware of how many parents/people complain about the calendar every single year.
I can not believe that someone would use
Triple C/ACAC camps as a reason for not exploring year round school calendars. As I said before, year round school would probably only impact elementary school students so therefore CATEC’s schedule would stay intact.
I mentioned Fluvanna because they have it for the elementary schools only.
I mentioned the camps in response to Jim’s comments above, rather as a reason not to consider year round schooling.
Why do you think it would only involve the elementary schools? I think Fluvanna does/did offer it only to elementary school students, but I could be mistaken about that. If I currently had school aged children, as a parent, I would not want them on two different school calendars.
There are 3 elementary schools in Fluvanna County and none of them are year round schools according to their calendars which are posted online.
I checked with a friend of mine who currently lives in Fluvanna county and is the parent of elementary aged children. This is what he said, “Fluvanna used to offer both traditional and year-round school options however the numbers dropped in recent years for the year-round option so the school board decided to do away with the year-round school option. Now, there is only one option and that is the traditional calendar August – May.”