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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2009 > February > 18
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Well, I guess that didn’t work
So Dayton’s school board has decided to junk it’s hybrid school calendar that started school early in favor of longer fall and spring breaks and return to a traditional calendar?
Interesting, especially since it was little more than a year ago that the school board president was telling me the district wouldn’t change course on the calendar even after canceling school due to heat because the educational benefits of the longer calendar were too important.
The truth is, the current calendar never made sense. It was a bad (and unnecessary) compromise. Add in the district’s failure to implement its vision for the calendar and parental disinterest and the calendar was a pretty big flop.
Here’s the quick history. The Gail Littlejohn/Kids First school board was in love with the idea of year-round school. They were completely sold on the idea that research was conclusive that kids backslid during summers. (In fact, the research is very mixed on this question.) To Kids First, summer was bad.
At the time Kids First came along, it inherited a bizarre bell schedule that had about a third of the district’s school on a year-round calendar with six-week summers and three-week breaks in fall and spring while the rest were on a traditional calendar with 12-week summers. This was incredibly costly as buses were running all year long.
Kids First wanted to put the whole district on a year-round calendar. But the board was afraid that kids wouldn’t show up for school until September. So they decided to split the difference and put everyone on the hybrid calendar with a 10-week summer and two-week breaks in spring and fall.
The smarter move back then would have been to realize that a traditional calendar made the most sense. But the board really believed it could use the breaks for intervention for kids and training for teachers. But those ideas were both busts. Hardly any kids signed up for the intervention even though it was free and included breakfast, lunch and transportation. Training never got off the ground. Teachers took vacation instead.
So now with a new board and superintendent, the district had decided to throw in the towel on this calendar and go back to a tradition approach. I’m interested in what students and teachers in the district think. Are you glad to see the hybrid calendar go? Or had you come to like it? Tell us in the comments.
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