Multiple countries around the world and parts of the United States, have students go to school year round.
Advantages of year round school
Year round schooling can provide many short term and long term benefits for both students and teachers. Those include better retention of material, more frequent breaks, and a more structured and detailed curriculum.
No "Summer Slide"
"Summer Slide" is a term that refers to how students forget material learned during the school year over the summer. Consequently, when they return to school, teachers have to spend time recapping what they learned from last year, instead of introducing new material.
Intense blocks of learning with more frequent breaks
With a year round schooling schedule, teachers must prepare more in depth and varied material to present during the full school year. Instead of having a 10 to 12 week summer session, year round schools have three week breaks every 45 days of instruction.
In a year round school structure, teachers must prepare more material for students to absorb and study. This makes the curriculum able to cover more topics or cover certain topics more in depth than in a 9 month school system.
Disadvantages of year round schooling include personal, financial, and extracurricular obstacles. Students may have a difficult time doing extra activities outside of school, parents and teachers may have issues with scheduling and daycare, and the governments may have issues with keeping up with the increased finances.
Parents will have more difficulty in scheduling
With year round schooling, parents and teachers may have trouble scheduling daycare around their personal work schedules. Planning family or personal trips also would become increasingly difficult with year round schooling.
Students have fewer non-academic learning opportunities
If a student goes to school year round, this leaves much less time open for them to have extracurricular activities or non-academic hobbies. Students would be required to spend their year on homework and studying, with less consolidated time to spend on cultivating their personal interests.
Financial costs for school upkeep and staff increase
If schools are open year round, the cost to maintain the school increases. The salaries of teachers would also go up. These financial increases could cause strain on the local or regional governments or raise taxes.
