Reply to NPR Article on Public Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Listen - you need to understand that we live in a society where there is a balance between supply and demand. Teachers are in serious demand and in low supply. The counties need to keep them as happy as possible and they don’t have any money to give them decent pay increases.  So they give them time off. We had huge turnover at my kids school over the last 1 1/2 years. I will gladly take a couple days off rather than go back to online or have 50 kids in a class.  If you want to keep your kids in school, take care of your teachers. Seriously. 
[/quote]

Then we really, really need to adapt the European model of year round school. 6 weeks on, 2 weeks off.

Let’s go already.[/quote]

I recently had a long conversation with my SIL about this. She's a former 2nd grade teacher (15 years), then elementary principal, now high level administrator in her school district. She says that while parents push back against the idea of year round school because change is hard, they aren't the real obstacle. Most families are two-income, and summers are hard in terms of childcare. Most families only take a couple weeks of actual vacation in the summer because they have to work, so the rest of the summer is just trying to keep the kids occupied and safe until school starts again. So while there would definitely be push back, a lot more families would get on board with this than you think.

The obstacles is teachers. This schedule is often one of the key selling points for many people who enter the profession, and long-timers have structured their entire lives around it. There are teachers who would support a year round model for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that it would make the actual act of teaching easier because you wouldn't have to deal with annual learning loss and re-acclimating kids to the classroom. And there are teachers who already essentially teach year round because they teach summer school most years. But as a group, there is a lot of resistance to a year-round model among teachers and that's the primary reason most districts haven't attempted it, even though it's an issue that comes up regularly.[/quote]

I'm a teacher and I'm not sure which group would push back against year round school with frequent breaks.  That said, I'd LOVE year round school with a break every quarter or every 8 weeks or whatever.  I do have many colleagues who would not like that.  As for child care, it could be made possible if schools which have the year round model offered childcare in the interim weeks.  Like day camp.  But that'd require staffing and right now there isn't hardly anyone willing to staff such programs.  Plus then there's the issue of which classrooms they'd have to use.  That is something I could not tolerate.  Having some camp staff worker in my classroom would mean all my stuff would get used, stolen or destroyed in the week or two of break.  Maybe if they'd limit the day camp program to just the gym that could work though.[/quote]

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