LOOKING FOR BALANCE
I remain curious about where support for year-round school is coming from, how much support there actually is, and whether there's any opposition. I've written a few stories about the Vancouver School Board's plan to launch a year-round school pilot project-potentially in three to six elementary schools. It's also known as a balanced calendar and involves shortening the summer break and adding longer breaks between sessions.
Proponents maintain it cuts down on learning loss during summer months, especially for vulnerable students, and that it fits in better with the modern-day schedules of families.
The job action is preventing consultation with teachers, so I doubt a pilot will be implemented any time soon. But superintendent Steve Cardwell was quoted in a Globe and Mail article earlier this week in which he mentioned the district would like to start it as early as September 2012 or 2013.
Cardwell told the reporter there hasn't been much opposition and some schools have expressed interest in being part of the pilot. He's told me in the past that interest has to come from school communities to be considered for the initiative.
The only school I've seen mentioned as interested is Thunderbird elementary on the East Side.
VSB spokesperson Kurt Heinrich told me in an email that Thunderbird has come up because "it's arguably the furthest ahead when it comes to community/parent/stakeholder discussions around this. But even they are only in initial phases of discussion about the concept and what it could look like."
When I pressed for more details about which other schools have expressed interest Heinrich couldn't specify.
".it's just at too early a stage right now to say X school and Y school are considering it because right now the main people who've expressed interest are various administrators and some parents as opposed to the entire school community (parent community, students, teachers, staff, admin, other stakeholders)," he wrote. "Until that changes, we don't want to go around saying 'this particular school is looking to switch to a different calendar system.'" But Heinrich insists September 2013 isn't an impossible goal to meet. "What we really are hoping to do with this is open up a dialogue about the idea of moving to balanced calendar. "It's a dialogue that we expect a number of schools to have in future and which will likely accelerate once job action is done and we can really start to talk with our teachers," he said. Readers, or individual schools, let me know what you think-I want to know if you're in favour of year-round school, or against, and why.
[email protected] Twitter: @Naoibh
