This post originally appeared in the Sept. 16 Morning Report. Subscribe to the Morning Report here.
From Allison Wood: Why isn’t San Diego Unified on a year-round schedule? What would it take to change?
We’ll skip the diatribe about holdover traditions from agrarian society and how summer is awesome, Allison, and get straight to the point.
San Diego Unified used to offer lots of year-round options, but in 2014 the Board of Education voted to bring its 39 year-round schools back onto a traditional academic calendar.
District officials, at the time, said they wanted to promote “greater community cohesion,” as this district webpage explains. They noted several problems from having so many schools on different calendars. Having siblings at different schools with different calendars sucked. Military families sometimes needed to transfer between schools with different calendars. And it made childcare hard if one sibling needed to take care of another on a different calendar.
Promoters of year-round calendars say they ensure children don’t experience “summer slide,” aka learning loss, and that teachers don’t have to waste the first month of school catching students back up. In general, students also get the same amount of time off from school; it’s just broken up.
There’s not a thing in the world blocking local schools from going year round. All of the schools at Sweetwater Union High School District are year-round and Sweetwater is the second largest district in the county.
So, in other words, for San Diego Unified to move to a year-round calendar it would take nothing more than a vote from the Board of Education — and summer being a whole lot less awesome than it is right now.
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