The opportunities that are presented to students during summer break are too significant to give up. Taking away summer break would prevent things like vacations and summer jobs.
Summer break usually lasts about 12 weeks, and runs from sometime in June to sometime in August or September.
These 12 weeks provide an extended time for students to experience a variety of things.
Vacations are a big part of summer break for many people and can be difficult to experience with a year-round school schedule. One of the common templates for year-round school is 45 days on, 15 days off.
This doesn’t allow for anything longer than a two week vacation, with only a single day buffer between vacation and school. Meanwhile, summer vacation allows students to go on extended vacations and still have multiple weeks to remain at home to relax or pursue other activities.
Perhaps the most significant activity that many teens engage in during the summer is a summer job. Many teens only work during the summer for various reasons.
Whether their parents won’t allow them to work during the year, whether they have too much school work, or whether they have a job that only exists during the summer, many teens make a significant amount of their yearly income during the summer.
If a school utilizes a year-round schedule, it would be nearly impossible for the students to obtain summer jobs.
While they would still be able to work after school, a large number of summer jobs require daytime hours.
A year-round school schedule would take away from the income of its students, and a school district has no right to do that.
More frequent breaks for students may be appealing to some students, but potentially not for their parents. Just because students have more frequent breaks does not mean that their working parents will.
This means that some parents would have to arrange extra child care that, in some cases, has to be paid for.
Some schools themselves would also be forced to pay more for year-round school, mainly because of the heat. We have recently experienced some of the hottest summers on record recently, and if students are in school during these summer months the school would be responsible for making sure that the school is safe for students and staff. This may mean replacing or purchasing new equipment and air conditioning, which can be very expensive.
Different school programs, like clubs and athletics, may also run into trouble with year-round schooling.
These programs have learned to work around summer break and would have to adjust to the shorter, more frequent breaks that come with year-round school.
For instance, sports would have to work around the fact that students won’t be present for two week periods in the middle of their schedules, which would greatly disrupt the seasons.
Additionally, other schools may be on different break schedules, whether they are year-round or not, and would struggle to schedule games when any number of schools could be on break at a given time.