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

DATE: SATURDAY, August 12, 1995                   TAG: 9508140036
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

REINVENTING THE SCHOOL YEAR

IN THREE months, a lot of cobwebs will gather in a house shuttered against sunshine and fresh air - and in a student's mind absented from the classroom for an entire summer. When school starts this fall, teachers must brush away the academic webs and dustballs before students are ready to pick up where they left off last spring.

Trouble is, that takes time: three or more weeks of the new school year simply to review material previously taught, in a country where kids spend fewer days in school to begin with than do their peers around the world.

So kudos to the Roanoke County School Board for considering proposals to rejiggle the school calendar. The gist of the proposals is to shorten the long summer break, replacing it with more but shorter vacations throughout the year. It's a progressive idea that the School Board, parents and students should embrace.

The concept, now established in more than 1,900 schools across the nation, has proved remarkably successful in improving academic achievement, learning retention and attendance. In school districts that have tried it, teacher and student burnout has been reduced, and so has the number of dropouts.

Moreover, it helps make more efficient use of school buildings, a major taxpayer investment. What with the summer vacation, plus weekends and holidays, those buildings under the traditional calendar sit empty for more days of the year than they're used.

This makes not a speck of sense. There never was an educational reason for calling time-out for the entire summer. As David Blevins, chairman of the committee making the recommendations, observed, the three-month vacation is an archaic relic from a time when children were needed for farm labor during the summer and when most mothers didn't work outside the home.

Those conditions are gone. Today, the three-month vacation serves little purpose.

Under one of the Roanoke County proposals, students would attend school for nine weeks and then be out for three. Or the county might go to a system in which students would go to school for 12 weeks, then be out for four. Either would be an improvement over the current schedule, although the number of days in the school year - 180 - would not change.

Even better would be to extend the school year to something closer to Japan's 240 days. As a federal commission reported in 1994, the traditional 180-day year shortchanges American schoolchildren. They spend less than half as much time studying core subjects of math, reading, history and science as do students in Japan, Germany and France. No wonder the academic achievement of American kids tends to lag behind that of their counterparts overseas - a lag that bodes ill for this country's enduring ability to compete in a global economy.

The Roanoke County schools, like others throughout Virginia and the nation, could really give kids a break by giving them fewer days off.

by CNB