School Calendar

While working at a restaurant, I have learned that people can be difficult and frustrating. Sometimes you need to take a long break. Because of this, I believe the current nine month school calendar is a superior system to the year round. Some of the reasons for this include: the ability for students to have summer jobs, the year-round system splits lessons up, and football two-a-day practices have to be held during summer break. While my own job doesn’t interfere with school, during the football season it is impossible to do much else other than football and school.

Many students I know plan on picking up jobs over the summer, which would be immensely harder to do on a year round system. Being able to get a job enables them to better understand the working environment and how to be successful. While this reason is moot for those who do not apply for jobs, I believe all students should have the opportunity to do so. Another thing to consider about the year round system is that it will cause certain lessons to be split up as a result of the increased number of shorter breaks. These 3-4 week breaks right in the middle of a class’s regular curriculum would cause a larger loss of information than the 3 month summer break would.

So the argument that a longer break would cause more memory loss isn’t a very effective one when you plan to increase the number of breaks in general. My last reason for siding with the current calendar system is that football two-a-day practices wouldn’t be able to be held during the short 3-4week breaks. Two-a-days last two weeks and it takes some time to recover from them, but the conditioning gained from it is the best you can get. While some people may not believe these practices to be completely necessary, they are an exceedingly important part of football. An athlete in mediocre condition means they don’t play as well at games. This in turn means that the football season will do poorly.

It also means the number of athletes that are recruited to go to college will significantly reduce from our school zone specifically. All things considered, between the necessity of student jobs, the inconvenience of splitting lessons apart, and the must have two-a-day practices, I believe we should leave the calendar as it is and not change it. The 3 month break is far to useful to throw out.