Year-Round Education

Year-round education (YRE) is a reorganization of the traditional school calendar into shorter attendance sessions with more frequent vacations. There is generally no increase in the number of attendance days, merely a rearrangement. Various scheduling options are available within the two design types of single and multitrack systems. Configurations are selected based on need, purpose, budget, or some combination of these.

The current 9-month school calendar emerged when 85% of Americans were involved in agriculture. Today, only about 3% of American livelihoods are tied to the agricultural cycle, and air-conditioning makes it possible for schools to provide comfortable learning environments year-round. Even rural America is no longer made up of individuals and families whose lives revolve around growing crops or tending livestock. With these drastic economic and technological changes, many find it puzzling that the school calendar remains agrarian based with the extended summer vacation.

Educators and parents often voice concerns about the possible negative impact of summer vacation on student learning. Harris Cooper wrote in 2003 that the long summer break disrupts continuous instruction and can lead to students forgetting the learned material, requiring significant review when the next school year begins. This can be even more detrimental for students with special needs.

Research is clear that extended vacation with the traditional calendar may result in loss of learned academic material, especially in math-related areas. Therefore, it seems reasonable to theorize that more frequent and shorter vacations would help reduce this loss. To that end, many have proposed changes in the school calendar that would do away with the long summer break and allow shorter and more frequent breaks throughout the year, that is, year-round or balanced calendar.

The first recorded opening of a year-round school was in Bluffton, Indiana, in 1904; the first multitrack school was in St. Charles, Missouri, in 1969; and the first year-round district was established in 1971 in the Valley View School District, Romeoville, Illinois. Currently, over 2 million students in the United States are enrolled in some form of year-round education; there are almost 3,000 schools in 41 states that operate on a year-round education schedule.

There are two types of YRE programs—single track and multitrack. Single-track programs have the entire staff and student body attending and vacationing on the same schedule. For multitrack programs, students and teachers are divided into groups, and each group is assigned to a track; the attendance and vacation schedules for each track are different and staggered. Multitrack is frequently selected to reduce facilities overcrowding.

C. C. Kneese in 2000 and Louis Wildman and others in 1999 wrote that within these two types of YRE, several scheduling models are available. The following are among the most common:

• 60–20/60–15. In 60–20, the year is divided into three 60-day sessions with three 20-day vacation periods between these sessions. The 60–15 model has the 60-day attendance sessions with vacation periods of 15 days. The additional 3–4 weeks of common vacation are added to the schedule.
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• 45–15/45–10. In the 45–15 schedule, there is a cycle of 45 days of instruction and 15 days of vacation. The 45–10 schedule follows the same pattern, with the vacation sessions being 10 rather than 15 days. The additional 4 weeks in the 45–10 schedule are used for common vacation time. The 45–15 and 45–10 plans account for the largest portion of all year-round school calendars.
• Concept 6. The Concept 6 calendar is divided into six terms of approximately 43 days each. Students and teachers attend two consecutive sessions of 43 days each and then have one session off; this cycle is repeated, totaling 175 instructional days per student.

Though research has been done regarding positive and negative impacts of YRE, results are mixed. Advantages of YRE are labeled “perceived.”

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