Summer vacation late in coming at year-round school

Some of the boys and girls glued together paper cutouts in the shapes of the continents for a lesson on landmass drift. Others struggled to finish an arithmetic test from earlier in the day.

"These last two weeks of school, it's hard to keep them focused," McQuade said, as a box fan whirred by the doorway.


	Students Priya Raj, Jessica Kilpatrick, Alex Gorski, Tat'yana Cherneychuk and others in Jeannie McQuade's fourth-grade class at Sunnycrest Elementary get some reading time outside. The Kent school, on a modified year-round schedule, lets out for the summer this Friday. Mike Urban / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

It's a lament as old as teaching. What's different at Sunnycrest Elementary is that the last two weeks of school fall in the middle of July. While kids in McQuade's class hunched over their desks, most other 9- and 10-year-olds in Kent and across America chased down fly balls, finished the latest Junie B. Jones book, watched an "Arthur" rerun or searched for roly-polies under the rocks behind the tool shed.

Sunnycrest, which is in the Federal Way School District, is one of a handful of schools around the Puget Sound area that run on a modified calendar, with a truncated summer vacation and longer-than-usual breaks during the 180-day school year.

Like most of the others, including two elementary schools in Edmonds and one in Tacoma, Sunnycrest switched to the so-called year-round schedule in the early 1990s. (T.T. Minor Elementary in Seattle adopted a 200-day schedule three years ago as part of an intensive, privately financed reform targeting education of underprivileged children.)

Nationwide, the number of year-round schools has increased steadily, according to the non-profit National Association for Year-Round Education in San Diego.

In 2000-01, more than 3,000 year-round schools across the country -- including 20 in Washington --enrolled more than 3 million students, the association said.

But the growth has been uneven. Much of it is concentrated in fast-growing areas of California, Arizona and Nevada, where school districts have adopted staggered year-round schedules to relieve overcrowding.

Many schools in other states have abandoned year-round experiments.

Meanwhile, opposition is becoming more organized and sophisticated, thanks to the networking capabilities of the Internet. Research shows no clear benefit to year-round education, critics say.

At Sunnycrest, the outlook on the unorthodox calendar is as bright as a blue-sky day in July.

"I love it," McQuade said. "Just about the time I'm really tired, I get a break."

After classes end for the summer this Friday, Sunnycrest will reopen Aug. 29. It will close for one-week vacations with other Federal Way schools over Christmas and in April.

But the Thanksgiving vacation will expand through the last two weeks in November, the Presidents Day hiatus will extend over the last two weeks of February and another break will cover the last two weeks in May, before the end of school on July 23, 2002.

That "balanced schedule" format, or variations thereof, is the model followed by most other year-round schools in the area and nationwide. A true extended-year schedule with more required days of instruction, as at T.T. Minor, is relatively rare.

Balanced schedules typically feature intersessions during the extra breaks when voluntary classes are offered. Choices range from cake-baking or modern dance to academic reinforcement for lagging students.

At Sunnycrest, about a third of the 480 students enroll in the classes, where the emphasis is on academics.


Student Annie Hicks takes down snowflakes from the windows of Jeannie McQuade's fourth-grade class at Sunnycrest Elementary in Kent, still in session in mid-July. Mike Urban / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"The thing we're trying to do is catch them before they fail," said Principal Mark Demick, who is finishing his second year at Sunnycrest. He previously taught at Evergreen Elementary in Mountlake Terrace, another school that runs on a year-round, balanced schedule.

"My perspective is that it just makes sense," Demick said. "The kids seem to retain more when they come back. The discipline problem seems to be less. The teacher burnout is less. And I'm a true believer that the longer you spread out the school year, the more time students have to pick up the concepts."

Catherine Grant, another fourth-grade teacher, transferred to Sunnycrest last fall after 20 years in traditional schools, drawn by the balanced schedule.

"It's sane," she said. "There's less stress for the kids. They're more open to learning."

Parents, too, like the program. "I wouldn't have it any other way," said Teresa Still, the mother of a fifth-grader. "It's a benefit for the kids that they are always learning."

The vanguard for the year-round schools movement is NAYRE. The mission of the 30-year-old organization, executive director Marilyn Stenvall said, is "to change from the 19th-century calendar to more accurately reflect the learning needs of today's students."

The big disadvantage of the traditional calendar, Stenvall said, "is that students are out of school for three months. Doing what? is the question. They're certainly not doing calculus if they're high-school students, they're probably not reading and writing any more and they may be unsupervised. It takes several months to bring kids back up to where they were when they left."

Trimming the summer vacation reduces learning loss between school years, Stenvall said. And intersession classes are better than standard-issue summer school for bringing underachievers up to speed because they "provide extra time for learning when students need it -- not failing them and telling them to do it over again next summer."

Proposals for year-round calendars have sparked bitter squabbling in cities and towns across the country. Opponents, from professors to stay-at-home moms, have moved from crying in the wilderness to linking up across the Internet, swapping war stories and information.

When school officials in Auburn, Ala., put forth plans for a balanced schedule in 1998, Auburn University psychology professor Christopher Newland decided to research other communities' experience with year-round schools.

"The evidence was that it would be about as effective as changing the color of the school buses," Newland said recently.

Newland, whose side turned back the proposal in Auburn, rejects the claims about learning loss. "The assumption is that at the end of the school year, you know everything you've learned since September," he said. "The assumption is that by shortening the summer by a few weeks, you're going to eliminate forgetting -- and that you didn't forget it between September and the end of the school year, which just makes no sense."

As for the benefits of remedial instruction during intersessions, Newland said, "The assumption is that in two weeks, you could make up for three months of failure. You're talking about kids that aren't doing well in school, they don't like being there and you're asking them to come back for more and learn faster."

For every testimonial in favor of year-round schooling, opponents counter with research that shows little or no benefit, such as an extensive 2000 evaluation by North Carolina education officials that reported "no difference between students in year-round schools and students in traditional-calendar schools with respect to either reading or math achievement."

Gene Glass, associate dean of research in the College of Education at Arizona State University, has studied balanced calendars since the 1970s. "You can't scrape up a piece of solid evidence that academic achievement is superior on that calendar," he said.

"The conclusion is that 180 days of schooling a year gives you 180 days of schooling output, regardless of how you arrange it or how you spread it out."

Opponents of a year-round calendar don't argue that it's worse for learning; they just say it's no better. And disrupting the time-honored September-to-June school year, they say, plays havoc with school sports schedules, summer recreation programs, even child-custody agreements for divorced couples.

"You can't go to Bible camp. You can't go to Scout camp," said Terry Melchin, a Kennewick homemaker who fought unsuccessfully in the early '90s against what turned out to be a short-lived experiment with year-round schooling in her town.

"Our culture is very entrenched with summer," she said. "And there is a reason: It's not far from basically being human on a planet with seasons."

In McQuade's warm classroom at Sunnycrest Elementary, fourth-grader Jemini Davis said the balanced schedule isn't a big deal for him. "It's not like, cool, cool, but it's all right," he said.

"I don't like it," classmate Kameron Souka said. "I don't like how you only get a month off for the summer break."

"I like it," said Priya Raj, another student, "because when it's our vacation, the people who are on vacation now have to go back to school -- and I can make fun of them."

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

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