Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 22, 1994                   TAG: 9410250010
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A LESSON WHOSE TIME HAS COME?

One-hundred eighty days is not enough time for all children to learn all they need in one school year.

The progressive Buena Vista school system has found both of these statements to be true.

Yet, 180 days is all that is allotted for the school year in Virginia - except in Buena Vista.

For 20 years, this small, industrial city up the valley from Roanoke has offered a year-round school program that promises to be a model for the future. This future, though, has been slow in coming to the rest of Virginia.

Unlike year-round programs in school districts that simply divide overcrowded classes and rotate attendance, Buena Vista's four-quarter program extends the school year for all high-school students who want to continue to learn through the summer. Those who choose to keep at it - and about 63 percent do - spend 218 days in school.

And 75 percent of Parry McCluer High School's senior class completed college courses before graduating. The extra time in school can be spent repeating a course needed for promotion to the next grade, for remediation, or for accelerated learning or student enrichment.

Schools Superintendent James Bradford believes passionately that all students can learn, given the time. For two decades, he and his staff have made time, rather than a child's ability, the variable in an education equation that has proved successful. Test scores and the percentage of students who go on to college have risen in Buena Vista since the year-round program was adopted, and the dropout rate has declined.

Buena Vista students usually score just a little above the state average on the Literacy Passport Test when it is first given, in the sixth grade. But last year, 100 percent had passed it by the time they entered high school. This year, only one student had not.

There is nothing magic about this kind of progress. It is based on a willingness to give each student the time it takes to master the skills needed to be functional in society.

The concept has caught on in other school districts - in North and South Carolina, Florida and Georgia, for example. In Virginia, though, there has been less interest than resistance - from teachers unenthusiastic about losing their summers off (Buena Vista's teachers are not required to participate), school boards worried about the added cost and, surprisingly, parents who don't want their kids to lose their three-month vacations.

That could change. The education committee of Gov. George Allen's Blue Ribbon Strike Force on government reform suggests that the Commission on Champion Schools re-examine both "the length of the school day and the school year with a view to extending them." Good. Education is not just a matter of time: Quality still counts the most. But quality also need time to sink in.