Here in Wake County, the latest brouhaha dominating the news, now that Duke Lacrosse has gone away, is the Wake County School Board’s plan to gain more student seats without building more schools by converting a number of elementary (and a smaller number of middle) schools from the traditional (aka “We all work on the farm during the summer”) calendar to the year-round (aka “We live in the 20th Century”) calendar.
As with any plan, there are pros and cons involved, but in this case, there’s a small but vocal group of parents who are, quite frankly, completely losing their shit. I’m talking Jerry Springer style. I’m amazed we haven’t seen chairs thrown at a school board meeting yet.
It all started when people noticed that Wake County, which is experiencing explosive population growth, didn’t really have enough space for all the kids who were moving in. So the school board did their calculating and came up with a number. A large number, but a number nonetheless. They figured that in order to build enough traditional-calendar schools to keep up with the growth just in the near term, they’d need a, say, $1.1 billion bond. So they ran some polls and tests with the voters, and found that voters would not support a school bond that large, and would vote it down in November. They didn’t poll me, but hey, sampling methods and all that. And voters seemed equally unwilling to put up with a more direct tax hike to finance the school building. The school board slashed a few hundred million off of the bond until they got down to a number that studies showed might pass.
So given that information, the school board still needed a few thousand more seats in order for children to have, y’know, a place to sit. So they had two choices – sprinkle magic pixie dust over the existing schools to have them magically grow more seats overnight, or convert schools to the year-round calendar.
For those who aren’t familiar with the year-round school concept, it’s pretty simple. The traditional school year (September-June-ish, with three months off in the middle of the summer) is a relic of a century ago, where the strong-backed young’uns had to go home to the fields to work the crops, and couldn’t be bothered with fancy-pants “book learning” during those months. But now, especially in urban areas like Raleigh, it just means that school buildings sit empty for 1/4 of the year, and kids have this massive break to forget everything they learned in the previous grade.
The year-round school concept, though, divides kids into four “tracks.” At any given time (barring holidays), three tracks are in the school and one track is on break. The school year runs roughly in four 12-week blocks, so a kid on a given track is in class for nine weeks of the 12, with a three-week break at some point during that time. So the kids go the same number of days, except they get more frequent, smaller breaks, and the school is in operation all year (thus the clever name). It boils down to a building running a year-round calendar can get ballpark 33% more students educated than the same building on a standard calendar.
So, great, right? Year round schools. Everybody wins. The school system can manage more students with the same number of buildings. The financial tightwads can avoid building schools. And the kids can work in an environment more conducive to learning than to picking tobacco. How can you go wrong?
Well, you can go wrong by having rabid parents screaming in school board meetings that “Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!” They loudly state that their lives will be unable to recover if little Johnny has to go to a year-round school. They wave studies “proving” that adding more year-round schools will somehow send the Wake County economy into a tailspin. They say that the school board is removing “school choice” from them by forcing their child to go year-round (of course, in my old house, I was zoned to a traditional-calendar school, and if I wanted Hayley to go year-round, I’d have to apply to one of the few year-round schools in the area, with a slim chance that I’d get picked). They rail about child care problems, as if they live in a world where child care options wouldn’t adapt to the new schedule, instead saying “No, I don’t think I’ll make money any more. This whole calendar thing is too tough. Sorry.”
There’s no hard data, but I’m willing to bet that this same vocal group shares quite a bit of overlap with the voters who wouldn’t pay the bond price to build enough traditional-calendar schools. So that’s a credibility hit right there. So as someone who has been following the issue for a while now, I’m seeing a substantial amount of vitrol from the anti-year-round side, but no workable solutions.
The school board voted today to turn 19 elementary schools into year-round. Good on them. Barring the inevitable lawsuit from a disgruntled parent, that should put the matter to rest. The anti-year-round faction is promising consequences and reprocussions at the ballot box in November, but I’m thinking that come Election Day, they’ll find out how small their vocal minority really is. Until then, though, expect regular news reports about the sky, and the rate at which it’s falling.
