Year-round Schooling? It Might Happen in Maryland

By Tracey Gold Bennett, Special from The Washington Informer

Children in Prince George’s County may one day be attending school year-round. That’s if the Board of Education (BOE) has its way. Year-round school is when a school’s schedule has several short breaks rather than that a long summer breaks. In November, the BOE in Prince George’s County voted in favor of the year round schedule.

“Certainly we want to have options available to maximize opportunities for success for students particularly where we need to make non-traditional choices in providing educational services. This clearly has cost implications, but as we continue to look at student based funding, year-round options gives us more leeway and actually demonstrates that budgets are truly ‘student needs-driven,’ said Verjeana M. Jacobs, BOE chair, District 5.  “Additionally the benefits happen in the classroom, every chance we have to impact success is a chance to improve student achievement. Sometimes that means we have to maintain the momentum, if you will, by keeping students consistently engaged.”

The National Association of Year Round Education (NAYRE) supports the theory that calendar arrangements make a difference in the overall learning of students.

“It [the research] is quite convincing. Interestingly, opponents of modifying and balancing school calendars usually deny that there is such research and rarely are accepting of the available findings. Educational research is very clear that there is summer learning loss because of the long summer vacation of the traditional calendar. That finding is rather consistent across many studies,” said NAYRE Executive Director Emeritus Dr. Charles Ballinger.

But do students who attend school year-round do better than students in nine month programs? Ohio State sociologist Paul Von Hippel authored a study and his research showed that students in year-round schools test scores approved at the same rate as students who attended school for nine months. An August 2007  Science Daily report published Von Hippel’s findings in which he also suggested in the article that year-round schools don’t solve the problem of summer learning setback.

Conversely, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found there are lasting consequences of the summer learning gap. Their researchers showed that students in year-round schools learn more over the summer than do their counterparts.

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The staff of Politic365.

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One Response to Year-round Schooling? It Might Happen in Maryland

1. MrsJesusChrist says:

   6:18pm December 2, 2011 at 6:18 pm

   Boy I'd bet my son is glad to be graduating this year. I really dont know what took them so long and think all kids should be in school from 9:00 until 5:00

   Reply