It seems that as every school year summer gets shorter and shorter, and that’s not just an impact of growing up and looking back to better times. In every new district calendar, summers shrink and new breaks are brought in to replace them. While there are a similar amount of holidays, the problem becomes the effect that these breaks have on both student learning and the structuring of school weeks.
While these more-frequent breaks can be relaxing to students, they can lead to a loss of learning, a higher volume of assignments in a shorter span of time and a lack of longer breaks, such as summer.
Firstly, a major issue with longer and more frequent breaks during school is a loss of learning. This loss of learning can also happen during summer, known as the Summer Slide. The Summer Slide is the learning loss of the end of year and the start of the next. Not only does this slide still occur even with a shorter summer break, but these longer and more frequent breaks also compound onto the issue, making the loss of learning more common. Week-long breaks such as this year’s Fall Break led to many students forgetting some of the material they were taught before the break. Some teachers even had to spend extra days reteaching their students material from before the break, which leads to wasted class time.
Speaking of wasted class time, another major issue with these longer breaks is that the nine weeks (that these long breaks occur in) become shorter as a result. The last two progress reports of the second nine weeks were both four days each, which led to many teachers being forced to assign and grade several assignments in a shorter span of time. This leads to extreme stress for both teachers and students as now, instead of using the week before final exams to review, they are showered with quizzes, projects and tests. This leads to students being less prepared for exams and potentially performing worse.
However, these breaks don’t just cause problems during school but also out of school. Normally during the summer, students are able to progress in life outside of school: finally having time for vacations, summer jobs, classes, driving school and internships. However, as summer becomes shorter, less of these things are viable. The average summer class in FBISD takes around three weeks to complete, which is around half of the total time of these shorter summers. As such, this leaves less time for students to do things like practice driving to get a license, take on a summer job or internship, or even just hang out with friends.
While one still can make use out of these longer breaks to study, work a job, practice driving or take a vacation, they will still be burdened by school work for the duration of the break. Scheduling is another issue that could be solved by expecting less amounts of work for certain weeks, but it would be better to simply allow more time for students to learn during the school year, leaving the majority of breaktime for the summer, and allowing students to better absorb content rather than having to rush or cram.
Overall, shorter summers and longer school breaks worsens student learning, increases stress and can lock students out of learning life skills and milestones. The best way to solve this, if the district wants to keep summers shorter, would be to have more days off rather than full breaks, giving students time to relax more often but not to where they begin to lose out on learning.
