Longer winter break, school year would hamper students

When students returned after winter break, some found that their school schedules had evaporated from their minds; others could not even recall their locker combinations.

Coming back to school after one or two weeks off is often wearisome, since upon returning to campus, students find that they are out of practice or utterly lost in the academic environment.

Now, according to the Mercury News, some schools — in states such as Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee — are considering a longer school year, including extended spring and winter breaks. This, however, raises the question of whether Saratoga High should do the same.

If either winter or spring break were lengthened, the amount of information lost and the difficulty of readjusting to the school schedule would increase significantly.

A longer break would also mean a shorter summer. Many students at this school use summer vacation time for classes, internships or jobs.

In addition, summer is intended to enable students to relax, providing them with a rare moment during which they can go on vacation, spend more time with family or simply sleep in. With summer cut short, these activities would become severely limited or impossible.

Some schools in the aforementioned states even want to have classes all year-round, with a month-long summer break, as has been modeled in certain schools in San Diego since the 1970s. Supporters of this idea believe that increasing the number of school days provides students from poor families with the opportunity to eat healthy lunches more often.

A longer school year might make sense in places where parents are not able to provide their children with the lunches they need. If students in these circumstances spent more time at school, they would be less likely to get themselves into trouble, legal or otherwise.

For example, the nationwide Knowledge Is Power Program stresses the importance of more time in school for those who are not as fortunate as students in this community. Students attending this school, however, would in no way benefit from a year-round schedule.

More conservative schedule change ideas include tacking on 20 to 30 days to the end of each school year; the five states previously mentioned have already added 300 or more hours to their school calendars this year.

Many schools already use calendars with more days than the 180 required by law. However, adding even more class time simply overloads the teachers, staff and students.

Though some may associate more time with the chance to absorb more information, academic success depends far more on a number of other factors, including students’ individual needs, competency of the teachers and difficulty of the material being learned; time plays a lesser role in the grand scheme of things.

There are even a few schools where all students and teachers are divvied up into four groups, with one group on vacation at a time while the other three are in school. This method not only rips friends away from each other, but it creates constant gaps in everyone’s school year, so that even teachers might have trouble acclimating upon their return to the world of academics.

Where this outlandish calendar came from, one can only wonder, but one knows this about Saratoga High for sure: More school days would only weigh the school year down, and it’s important that it keep a trim figure.