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Story and Photos by Borden Black

More than 2 million students in nearly 3,000 public schools attend classes year-round according to Education World. Seven of those schools are here in Muscogee County.

The term “year-round education” is somewhat misleading. Actually students in year-round schools are in class the same number of days as students on traditional calendars, but instead of a threemonth summer vacation, schedules include several shorter vacations, or intercessions, spaced throughout the year.

Rigdon Road Elementary School piloted the concept in Muscogee County nine years ago. By this year six other schools had jumped on the bandwagon: Hannan Elementary, Georgetown Elementary, Dawson Elementary, Baker Middle, Forrest Road Elementary and the Woodall Center. Two of them, Forrest Road and Baker will return to the traditional calendar next year and the concept is being examined at Dawson.

Under the year-round calendar being used in Muscogee County, students get three long breaks: in the fall, at Christmas and in the spring. They also get four and a half weeks in summer.

Phyllis Jones, principal at Rigdon Road, is an unabashed cheerleader for the yearround calendar. She says the most important and dramatic change has been an increase in test scores. Before Rigdon adopted the year-round calendar she says the school was around 900th in achievement of the about 1,000 elementary schools in the state. This year the school is number two, is a national Blue Ribbon School and 100% of the third and fifth graders passed the Criterion Reference Tests (CRT) last year. Hannan and Georgetown have also made significant test score gains, she reports.

Deputy Superintendent Dr. Robin Pennock sees results of the calendar systemwide as mixed. “We have two schools that had opted for the year-round schedule and abandoned it,” she said. “We simply had too many parents opt out and it was hurting the allotment.”

Jones says YRE isn’t right for every school. There are challenges and it takes preparation. “We talked about doing something that would make a difference for children,” Jones said of the initial plan. “We looked at the research. They usually lose a lot of what they have been learning during the summer, especially African Americans, because of a lack of books in the home and they don’t go on as many trips.” A large proportion of the student body receives free or reduced price lunch and 100% are African American.

Year-round education seemed to be the right solution. “First the teachers bought in to it and took trips to different school systems,” Jones said. “The faculty sold the parents.”

Rigdon Road had a lot of things going for it when they piloted the calendar. The school, with student enrollment of 224, is a small one and all the students are able to walk.

Jones says the experiment has paid off. “Each year it’s getting better,” she said. “We’ve learned to use time off for interses- sion and after school tutoring that will help the children. We provide activities during the time off so it’s just like coming to school.” Not only are test scores way up, but there has been a tremendous decrease in student absenteeism and teachers don’t take as much time off. Discipline problems have also decreased. “We have nowhere near the things that most schools deal with because they are in a routine with structure and so are less likely to cause discipline problems.”

Teachers like the 45 days on and 15 days off, Jones said, and she has very little turnover. The parents have discovered they can still vacation and the kids can still go to vacation Bible school, but there is more consistency. The big complaint, according to Jones, is that there is no year-round middle school.

According to Jennifer Allen, student service director, a January report shows 92 parents in Rigdon’s attendance zone opted not to send their children there. “That may not be entirely because of the year-round calendar,” she said. “They have changed from the school in the past because they are closer to Wynnton,” she qualified. On the other side, 79 students who didn’t live in the attendance zone decided to attend Rigdon. At Georgetown 276 left the zone to go elsewhere, while 51 came in. That school’s enrollment is 528.

While Jones doesn’t believe year-round school is right for everyone, she believes it can work if there is a consensus of faculty and parents. “If they want it to work, it can work.”

It was new parents, that hadn’t bought into the concept, that brought an end to the year-round schedule at Forrest Road Elementary and Baker Middle. Bea Riley, principal at Forrest Road, says students in her school were already doing well and they didn’t see dramatic gains in test scores. “It has the potential of being a wonderful concept, but it is hard in some areas with brothers and sisters attending schools on a different schedule,” Riley said. That was also one of the problems parents at Baker had with the calendar. “This is a transient community,” Baker Principal Joann Brown explained. “The children lose so much when they move from another attendance zone. They lag behind. We decided as a group do what is best for the children.”

Pennock says generally speaking, the year-round concept is not popular with parents, although some of that negativity is being fueled by the tourism industry, which is promoting longer summers. She says research shows that student performance is better if the three-week intersessions are used to the maximum. She also points out that year-round schools cost the district more for transportation and some personnel costs, and with the growth at Fort Benning if a lot of parents requested transfers, it would be difficult. “I think in the end we have to listen to our parents,” she concluded.

Opponents have a litany of negatives. There are groups opposing non-traditional calendars in both Georgia and Alabama. “Georgians Need Summers” points out on its website that non-traditional school calendars often include mini-breaks throughout the school year and finding childcare during these breaks can be difficult, and costly. They also argue that year-round school often makes it impossible for teachers to attend continuing education conferences or get advanced degrees at local universities. Another argument against the schedule is that it eliminates summer jobs for students. Opponents also point to statistics that more than 50 schools in Georgia had adopted the “balanced” or year-round calendar by 2002 and the average composite score of Georgia students on the American College Test dropped from 20.3 in 1994 to 19.8 in 2002.

A group called Stop Year-Round School defeated a move to an alternative calendar in Auburn in 1998. Christopher Newland, a parent and professor of psychology at Auburn University, in a report of his research of the topic writes, “after evaluating about 100 studies of Year-Round Education programs from around the country, I found that the evidence that it benefits children is weak and inconsistent. From the evidence available it appeared that, as far as academics is concerned, changing the calendar is about as effective as changing the color of the school busses. I was against implementing this type of school year because I want my children to have the opportunity to benefit from other types of learning that are only possible during a long summer break.”

Floyd County, in northwest Georgia, adopted a modified calendar for its elementary, middle and high schools in 2003. During the March National Association for Year-Round Education (NAYRE) conference they reported significant improvements in achievement. Since 2003 SAT scores have risen 27 points and the system has met all 100 indicators for annual yearly progress.

NAYRE Executive Director Emeritus, Dr. Charles Ballinger wrote, “Educational research is very clear that there is summer learning loss because of the long summer vacation of the traditional calendar.” He pointed to studies that support that conclusion and to a study from Texas A&M “There is an effective maintenance and improvement of the overall academic performance of students participating in a year-round education program in comparison to those on the traditional calendar,” according to the researcher Dr. Carolyn Kneese.

A year-round calendar on a local system-wide basis doesn’t appear to be an option, but the summers are getting shorter. Pennock is adamant the days spent in the classroom are the same but have been shifted slightly for some very good reasons. In particular she points to the Board of Regents decision to put universities on the semester system. To help high school students going to college and teachers continuing their education, secondary schools went to the semester system. “It’s very bad for high school students to have Christmas break then come back to finals, so we concluded the first semester had to end by Christmas break.” Pennock explained that meant a shift in summer vacation. She encourages people to look at the website www.mcsdga.net where school calendars are posted two years in advance.