Persuasive Essay On Year Round School

The traditional school calendar was created to meet the needs of farmers who needed the summer vacation for crop harvest. However, in today’s society this need no longer needs to be met, yet we still follow the traditional school calendar. Needs that do need to be met in today’s schools are, preventing summer learning loss, lessening the achievement gap between low income and high income students, and academic improvement. A year round balanced calendar could meet all these needs because of its balanced and regular breaks. Although it may sound like it, A year round calendar does mean students attending school the whole year with little breaks. In a year round balanced calendar setting, students actually attend the same amount of days as a traditional calendar; however the breaks are more evenly spread out causing school to go year round. Typically in a year round school students go to school for forty five days and receive a fifteen day break, except for summer break where they receive a thirty day break.

About 2.6 months of math skills are lost over the summer according to Oxford Learning. Similarly, two months of reading skills are lost after the long summer break. To compensate for this, six weeks in fall are used to catch up on previously learned material. Asking students to come back from such a long break and still be proficient in everything they have learned in the past, is like asking an athlete to be perfect at the first practice back from the off season. A balanced year round schedule would provide a summer the right length that students could still retain information while not becoming run down (“Summer learning loss