By Chris Andrews

HOLT: It was late June, and many Michigan children were heading up north, zoning out on video games or simply hanging out with friends at the start of summer vacation.

Not so for the 350 students at Holt’s Horizon Elementary School. They were still in school, and due to return after a six-week vacation in early August, nearly a month before most of their peers.

And that is just the way parents like Kim Berry-Smokoski want it. Her son Dylan was spending his last days in kindergarten reading and working on number sentences teaching early arithmetic. Her other son, Ian, studied multiplication and wrote “small moment stories” as he completed second grade.

“I love it. I love this school,” said Berry-Smokoski, who often volunteers at Horizon. “My second-grader doesn’t lose a thing over the summer. He doesn’t ever completely get out of school mode.”

Holt’s Horizon Elementary School is one of a small number of schools in Michigan with so-called “year-round calendars.” But it’s an idea that is getting growing attention in the school reform movement. It’s not the never-take-a-break schedule that the name suggests – some prefer calling it a “balanced calendar.” Whatever the name, the idea is this: Students and teachers will stay fresh, learn better and forget less if their breaks are spaced out rather than lumped into June, July and August.

While year-round schools are the exception rather than the rule, their supporters are enthusiastic. Pupils at Horizon boast the district’s best MEAP scores. In Grand Rapids, students at the four year-round schools are generally showing more improvement than peers in traditional schools. Meanwhile, at Ridge Park Charter Academy in Kentwood, the principal notes that after a single year of year-round education, the school has gone from a below-average National Heritage Academy to one of the best.

The backers include educators, business leaders, policy-makers and others looking for new ways to help students develop the talents to succeed in a highly competitive, skill-driven economy.

They say the lengthy, 10-week summer vacations that are the norm in Michigan and across the country are anachronistic and detrimental to Americans’ ability to compete globally. They say the breaks are especially harmful to low-income and minority children, who are less likely to benefit from summer camps, enrichment programs and world travel during their summer vacations.

“The fact of the matter is, we’re not losing jobs to Mexico because labor is cheap, we are losing high-end jobs, we are losing high-tech jobs to countries like China and India and Germany,” said Sam Pepper, executive director of the National Association for Year-Round Education. “I don’t know why for some reason when it comes to education, we just revert back to 1700.”

The discussions of school calendar have intensified with a new administration in Washington. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have both conceptually embraced longer school days and school years. Duncan says he believes schools should be open 11 or 12 months.

Long tradition of long summers

America’s tradition of long summer breaks from school dates back centuries, to an  agrarian era when children were needed to help on the farms. A time when, to be blunt, education was viewed as far less important than it is today.

The Agriculture Age has passed, and so, painfully, has the Industrial Age. Michigan residents can no longer walk out of high school – with or without a diploma – and into an auto plant and a good-paying job leading to a middle-class life and a cottage up north. Now, the times and the stakes have changed, leaving some education reform advocates convinced that 10-week summer breaks are a luxury that students can no longer afford.

If summer is a time to relax, it is also a time to forget. Research shows that students lose about a month’s learning over the summer, says Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and one of the leading experts on year-round school.

The National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University reports that most students lose math skills over the summer. Middle class students tend to hold their own in reading, while low-income students slip. Students in families where English is a second language can face even greater learning loss.

Cooper doesn’t see year-round school as a panacea, but he believes that for most students, 10-week vacations are excessive. He also notes that they have “absolutely nothing to do with the way that families live today.”

“It is a step in the right direction, but a small step,” he said. “If you are going to do that, then I would certain suggest that Title I funds that are used for remediation be used to fill up the intersessions (shorter breaks sprinkled through the school year) with added instruction. That probably can be done without a great deal of expense.”

The Holt experience

Holt’s Horizon Elementary School, a K-4 school with 350 students, is a year-round school pioneer, and the only school in the Lansing area with an alternative calendar. The building was designed with air conditioning with a year-round approach in mind, and it has operated that way since opening in 1993.

The school has the same number of days — 179 — as other schools in the district, but it configures them differently. Teachers work with the same contract as their colleagues at other schools – which includes the year-round calendar at Horizon. They have a six-week summer break with classes resuming on Aug. 5.

“Kids understand that we are going to teach until the end of the school year, and they are going to learn until the end of the school year,” principal David Hornak said. And, equally important, students are ready to hit the ground running when they return – not needing to re-learn rules or routines. “Fifteen minutes or less after the first day of school, the students are engaged in academic work.”

Schools with year-round calendars use a variety of schedules. In Horizon Elementary’s case, there is a two-week vacation in October (Hornak says students return rested and ready to take the MEAP tests), and a full week around Thanksgiving. Other breaks include: 2 1/2 weeks at Christmas, a week in February, and two weeks in April.

During the periods when students are off, the school provides “intersession opportunities” – tuition-based, multi-age classes that supplement the traditional curriculum. “The theme may be ‘Down on the Farm,” and they would study about farms, and then they might go visit a farm,” Hornak said.

Ramona Berkey, a special education teacher, has taught at Horizon since 1995. She considers it “a very healthy calendar, with breaks paced very nicely throughout the year.” She believes the lengthy vacations that are part of traditional-calendar schools result in too much learning loss.

“A lot of children, particularly our fragile learners, really do some regressing over the summer unless the parents are really, really conscientious in keeping them involved in enrichment activities and reading,” she said.

Other states

The National Association for Year-Round Education estimates that there were about 3,000 school teaching about 2.1 million students in year-round settings in 2006-07. Because the organization relies solely on volunteers, that is the most recent data available.

More than half of those students come from California, which turned to a year-round calendar to save money after Proposition 13 made it more difficult to raise taxes to build new schools, said Pepper, a former Arizona newspaper publisher.  By operating on a multi-track system, with three tracks in class, one on vacation, administrators kept schools operating 12 months of the year, allowing them to get by with fewer buildings.

There are pockets of year-round education around the country – some created for financial reasons, others for educational. San Diego and Las Vegas both have implemented it extensively. Fairfax County, Va., is considered a leading model.

But Pepper says there’s too much pushback from educators protecting the status quo. “We are living in a fast-paced, high-tech, fast-changing society, and there’s jobs existing today that a few years ago we didn’t even dream about,” he said. “But the school system and the public education system are really resistant to changing hardly anything at all.”

Growing interest here

In Michigan, state law discourages year-round education. The Legislature enacted a law several years ago that bans schools from starting before Labor Day, a response to tourism industry complaints that earlier starts were costing them business. Year-round schools must get a waiver from the Department of Education to open sooner.

Still, in the past few years, a few schools have taken the plunge.

Grand Rapids recently went to a year-round calendar at four schools – Campus and Dickinson Elementary Schools, Coit Creative Arts Academy and Grand Rapids Montessori – largely in response to requests from parents and school staff. A fifth, Campau Park Elementary, will convert to year-round operation in August.

“It’s proven to be a pretty great success,” said  John Helmholdt, director of communications for the district. “If you look at the pure numbers academically, they do perform better than the traditional schools.”

Ridge Park Charter Academy in nearby Kentwood switched to a year-round calendar last year. Several families took their children out of K-8 school, but principal David King says the experience has made a big difference at a school where 70 percent of the children come from families eligible for free or reduced lunch.

The school, which is part of National Heritage Academy system, was ranked near the bottom of 57 company schools in meeting targets for student achievement, King said.  Now, it’s ranked No. 3.

“What I find is the biggest hurdle is breaking the paradigm of the way people think things should be,” said King, who has been principal for five years. “Clearly in my mind as an educator, the way we have been doing things hasn’t been working, so we’ve got to start looking outside the box and figuring out how to educate these guys. And it’s not by taking off three months in the summer, even though that’s the way it was when we were kids.”

On the other hand, some schools have tried year-round calendars and switched back.

Wyoming’s Huntington Woods Elementary was year-round from 1993 to 2004, but returned to a traditional calendar to trim operational costs, the Grand Rapids Press reported. Okemos’ Bennett Woods Elementary reverted back at the same time it was closing another school and reconfiguring classes.

Barriers to overcome

Proponents of year-round calendars acknowledge that there are unique challenges. At Holt Horizon Elementary, for example, while teachers work to the modified calendar, consultants such as hearing specialists or physical therapists supplied by the intermediate school district typically work on a traditional calendar. “If we have a child who needs those services, we have had to be very assertive to make sure the county is serving our children when we start early or end late,” said Berkey, the special education teacher.

Summers are also the time when many teachers take classes to earn master’s degrees or do other professional development. Colleges have started new semesters by the time classes let out, although many programs offer five-week classes as well.

And because year-round school is typically limited to elementary schools, families often face a time when different children are on different calendars, complicating family vacations and day care issues.

But advocates say such problems are surmountable, and benefits important enough to make the change.

In Detroit, University Prep Math and Science Middle School, a charter school, for sixth through eighth graders, is seriously considering the year-round calendar beginning in 2010-11, said Superintendent Margaret Trimer-Hartley. It will be studying the issue and consulting with parents and faculty before making a decision sometime next year.

”The data is pretty clear, especially for kids who are in high-poverty communities, when they are gone for extended periods of time, they lose ground,” Trimer-Hartley said.
“If we care about stepping up educational achievement in general, but in particular for urban communities, this has to be an option that we look at very seriously.”

King, the principal at Ridge Park Charter Academy, couldn’t agree more.

“It’s such a no-brainer to me that I’m amazed that other schools haven’t been doing it,” he said. “I’m happy to be the one who’s doing it.”