It's a typical first day of school at Hall Fletcher Elementary in Asheville, N.C. Principal Gordon Grant stands outside the school in a white suit and bow tie, greeting kids with fresh haircuts, new shoes, and even a tutu.
But there's something different about this first day of school. This one is happening in July, after just five weeks of break. This public school is beginning a three-year experiment in running on a year-round schedule. The students will get the same number of school days as others in the district, just distributed differently: five weeks in the summer, three-week breaks in September and March, plus a winter holiday vacation.
A primary motivation for running school year round is so kids don't fall behind academically over the long summer break — a phenomenon known as the "summer slide." About 80 percent of the students at this school are eligible for free and reduced lunch, and Grant says, "Children who don't have really good enriching opportunities provided for them in the summer move back academically."
Tamera Owen is the grandmother of two students at Fletcher Hall, a kindergartner and a second-grader, and she says she can see them "retaining things that they learned."
Karl Alexander is a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. He studies learning gaps between students at different income levels. He says this gap widens during the summer break, when "school is out of the picture" and students are dependent on the resources of their families and communities. Asheville City Schools has seen the same pattern in their own students when given reading tests before and after summer vacation.
According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, there are 3,700 public schools in the United States operating year-round, or about 4 percent of the nation's schools. They are most common in the South. The research on their impact on student achievement is spotty and inconclusive, although some studies show a small positive effect.
Paul von Hippel at the University of Texas at Austin is among the scholars who has looked at this question. He says it evens out: "Students learn more in the summer," but on the other hand, 'They're learning less in the school year."
This isn't the first time Hall Fletcher has tried to shift to a year-round schedule, also known as a "balanced schedule." They experimented with the idea back in the '90s. "After three years they dropped it because of the mismatch of the balanced school year calendar with the regular school year calendar," says Principal Grant. "I think we've done a better job of matching those calendars this year."
This story comes to us from member station WCQS in Asheville, N.C.
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