Year Round School

Year round school is an argument that we, as the students, should most definitely get a say in. Of course, we all want to continue doing what we’ve always done, and ignore all other options.

When I was younger, I thought that summer vacation was the best thing ever. But as I’ve gotten older, I started to think, and then I realized that year-round school actually had a lot of good points on its side. One of the most important to me is that if all schools switched to a year-round schedule, it would not only help our education, but it would also make it so much easier to plan those long vacations. In my school, we spread out the days that we get off, using them for everything from the District Animal Shows to the State Basketball Tournament. Because of this, our four main breaks during the school year, Fall Break, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Spring Break, are all short.

Most of the time, if you plan any sort of vacation during the school year, you take off a couple days of school, and even then you get at most two weeks of vacation, at that’s when you’re on the longest break during the school year that you have! If we divided the school year into big clumps, we could plan a vacation that could last two, maybe even three weeks, and still get home before our break was over. There’s also the education advantage it gives us to consider. I don’t know about you, but even after a short break, I feel like I’ve lost a lot of the information that’s been pounded in my head. Since my school has so many days off, scattered all through the year, we never get very far in our studies! Most of our teachers prefer to have year round school, too. According to surveys done in year-round districts, 60-90% of teachers would rather have year-round school. Teacher and student absences went down when schools switched to the year-round schedule, because of the shorter instruction cycles, according to Wikipedia.

I know a lot of people would rather stick to the old custom of having a long summer vacation then switch to a system that seems like something a boarding or private school would do, but if you really just drop the biased opinions and look at all the good things that come from a year-round system, there’s really no question to it.