Since public schools started in America, the usual school year ends right before summer. This gives students and teachers a three month break of summer vacation in between the school year. Over time, people have challenged this school year normativity by starting year round schools that do not include a three-month summer vacation, but only a few short three week breaks. This new practice may seem like great idea or innovative, but by eliminating the usual school year for this year round school it would be detrimental to the education of students, the community and the micro economics in their community.
Year-round school has been around since the early 1900s . It may not be prevalent in the Stillwater school district, but it is still a hot conversation in Minnesota. Some schools have switched to year round schooling such as Apple valley, Roseville and even in St Paul. More and more schools are switching to this new form of education and it raises the debate, whether or not there should be year round schooling.

The initial reason the three month break was created was because children of farmer’s couldn’t go to school because the harvest. Although most children don’t live on farm’s anymore having year round school would still take away from them, there families and their community.

The standard of learning and academic performance would go down. According to a study done by Healthy schools, students who were held in a warm classroom and opened windows scored 13 percent lower than what they would in a controlled environment. Having school during the summer would just bring more distractions towards students negatively affecting them.

The main argument for year round schooling is that it would benefit students academically by tackling this idea of “summer slacking”. Many students feel as though they do not go through this,that they do not lose a lot of prior knowledge and that it only takes them a few weeks to get the knowledge fully back. By making students go to school during the summer, it would take away from their learning experience in the real world.

Sometimes the best education is one that doesn’t require a book and for students that is what summer means for them. Taking summer break away from these children would actually be less prepared for the real world, this is a contradiction to what education is meant for.

Year round school would also be detrimental to people of the community. It would make it harder for children to get childcare and participate in extracurriculars. Already getting child care is hard enough but according to Tenney School it would be even harder. With many year round school they have a couple short breaks of up to three weeks having to find childcare at these short breaks would be difficult. Year round school would also negatively affect extracurricular activities. During the three week break periods children may not have transportation to get to games and practices since they can’t simply stay after school.

According to the NEA it can also be difficult for groups to schedule competitions. If every school a team plays against isn’t on the same track, it may be hard to find dates within a sport’s season that work for all schools. Other extracurricular activities like summer camps will also be out of reach for kids who don’t have summers off.