Everyone into the School!

By SOPHFRONIA SCOTT GREGORY

Summertime, and most American schoolchildren are taking it easy: hitting the beach, going to summer camp or just sitting around the house bored out of their skull. But for kids like Amy Simon, 9, of Mooresville, North Carolina, a new school year is just beginning. Last week Amy was in her air-conditioned fourth-grade science class at Park View Elementary, mixing together polyvinyl and Borax to make red, green and yellow slime. "If you have the whole summer off, you get bored," she says. Instead of a long summer vacation, Amy now goes to school year-round, with shorter but more frequent break periods. "Just when I get tired of school, it's time for a break," says Amy. Her next respite will be a three-week vacation in September, when most kids her age are trudging back to class.

The reason for the seemingly topsy-turvy schedule is that Park View is one of 1,905 schools in the U.S. that are in session year-round. Praised by educators and parents as a way for students to learn better and schools to operate more efficiently, year-round schooling is steadily catching on. As of June 30, 1.4 million students were enrolled in year-round schools, from rural North Carolina to inner-city Detroit -- an increase from 429,000 five years ago. The largest number are in California; 42% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state's largest, are enrolled in year- round programs. The apparent success of such schooling has inspired hundreds of districts across the country to study the concept; if current trends continue, National Association for Year-Round Education officials say, the number will more than double by the end of the decade.

"The traditional school calendar was set when children had to help out in the fields and most mothers didn't work outside the home," says Mooresville program supervisor Carol Carroll, who has seen Park View grow from 202 children in 1990 to 1,101 children, representing 49% of the town's grade- school population. "Families today have a completely different life-style. This is a program that works for how we live today."

It may also be the answer to the decades-old concern that American students are being ill-prepared by their educational system to compete with their counterparts overseas. A federal commission fueled such fears when it reported in May that American students spend less than half the time studying the core subjects of math, reading, history and science that students in such countries as Germany, France and Japan do. Education critics have long called for extending the U.S. school year from its current 180 days to something closer to Japan's 240 days.

A few schools have attempted to do just that. Beacon Day School, for example, a private school in Oakland, California, operates 240 days a year, with vacations scheduled at parents' leisure. More commonly, however, schools have simply reorganized the traditional 180-day schedule. At Park View, classes run for nine weeks, followed by a three-week break, a schedule known as a 45/15 calendar. Other schools, such as those in the Socorro Independent School District in El Paso County, Texas, use a 60/20 model: 60 days of school followed by 20 days of vacation.

One major benefit of such schedules is to improve students' retention rate. Teachers in traditional nine-month schools often must spend three to six weeks in the fall reviewing material learned the previous year. "The year-round program is particularly good for at-risk students because they don't have that long summer to forget what they struggled so hard to learn," says Brenda Teeter, a Mooresville science teacher.

Break time is not always vacation time. During the three- or four-week period, teachers may use one week to help students who have fallen behind, another week to give special attention to gifted students. Schools may also offer enrichment classes in such topics as photography or world cultures. "Even when they're on intersession, kids come to the school recreation room to play pool, Monopoly and Ping-Pong," says Eva Valencia, a volunteer coordinator at a Socorro school. "This way the kids can come to school instead of hanging out on the streets and joining gangs."

By the most objective measure, test scores, year-round education seems to be working. Before switching to its new schedule, Socorro schools had some of the lowest test scores in the county. Now Socorro students outscore the state average on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. One Socorro school, Campestre Elementary, sits just 200 yards from the Rio Grande; two-thirds of its predominantly Hispanic students have limited English proficiency. Yet 87% of Campestre's third-, fourth- and fifth-graders passed the state's achievement exam, compared with 67% before the school started its year-round schedule four years ago.

Year-round schools can also be a way to use facilities more efficiently. Some overcrowded schools stagger students into different tracks, ensuring that a fraction of the student body will be away during every grading period. Socorro schools were able to serve 2,000 more children during the 1993-94 academic year because of its multitrack calendar, a great help in a district that grows by 1,500 kids a year.

For all the advantages, however, converting to year-round schooling can be difficult and expensive. To endure the summer heat, many schools must install air conditioning. Teachers' salaries may go up, since they usually work more weeks, and there is limited time off for administrators. Some schools, unable to afford the extra expense, have returned to traditional terms.

Parents can be difficult to convert as well. Many hold tight to the tradition of long summer holidays, touting family outings as valuable experiences that provide quality time with their children. "The traditional school calendar is too deeply embedded in me," says Debbie Lanier of Mooresville. "We live on a lake, and we couldn't enjoy it in other months." But other parents find the life-style change beneficial. Says Robin Andrews, a landscape designer in Mooresville who has two children in the year-round program: "We can take the kids on vacations that are less crowded and less expensive because we don't go during peak periods."

Parents can also take comfort in the biggest surprise of all: children who attend year-round schools actually seem to like them. Melissa Hill, a fifth- grader at Socorro's O'Shea Keleher School, had her initial doubts about year-round schooling. "But now I like it a lot," she says. "When I used to wake up in the morning, I felt like I wanted to crawl back in bed. I think it encourages kids to go to school because you always know that you're going to be on break soon." Mireya Reyes, a fifth-grader at Campestre, doesn't miss the old summer vacation either. "In one month we do everything we want," she says. "And then we come back and like school better."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Mooresville and Bonnie I. Rochman/Atlanta