Year Round Schooling

A debate that keeps coming back: Year round schooling. Experts regularly ask for year round schooling in Ontario. This is a practise in other parts of the world. As a teacher of over 30 years, I have to ask who would want to be in a school that is not air conditioned during one of our heat waves and we do have them in July and August. Most countries that have year round schooling do not experience the extremes of temperature that we do or they have air conditioning in their schools. An article in today's Toronto Star mentioned a school in Peel that has been using the year round system for 4 years. Based on the name of the school, Roberta Bondar, this is a school that was built with air conditioning. I have worked and taught in schools with no air conditioning; there is nothing that reduces learning more than extreme heat. The cost of refurbishing our older schools would be cost prohibitive.

The author of the article also mentions that he believes that students stop learning in mid-May and effectively are not learning for 6 months of the year. I would have to say that is true if school activities and teachers appear to present an attitude that it is now play time and students are programmed to participate in many fun activities. Trips, play days and many activities are planned for the end of May and June which suggest to students that learning at this time is not as important. I have had the opportunity to work at the high level after working at the grade 7 and 8 level and learning definitely does not fall off at the high school level because students have exams and summatives to complete and study for. Perhaps, students at the elementary level need similar incentives to keep learning?

I also wonder why this issue is only a concern for students in elementary school. High school students have the same break. Is it because some of them work at summer jobs to finance post secondary education that we do not express the same concern? There does not seem to be a concern about the fact that post secondary students have a 4 month break. Does the brain function differently at a certain age and we no longer forget?