The Garden City Telegram
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Group discusses year-round school option for GCHS
Published 8/24/2007 in News : Education By Emily Behlmann
Models of year-round schooling a study group discussed Thursday night could reduce by at least 25 percent the number of students and teachers in the crowded Garden City High School at a given time, but members of the group said it wouldn't be an effective long-term solution to facility concerns.
The idea of a year-round calendar was one of 10 options a group of school district staff, students and community members is discussing this month and in early September as possible solutions for what administrators have said is an overcrowded high school with inadequate science labs, music rooms, gymnasiums, locker rooms, athletic practice fields and other facilities.
In October, the group plans to recommend one of the options to the USD 457 Board of Education.
Under the year-round school concept, instead of having one three-month summer break, breaks would be shorter and distributed throughout the year. Samples from the National Association for Year-Round Schools show calendars where students attend for nine weeks and are off for three, or attend for 12 weeks and are off for four. Students would have the same number of attendance and vacation days as under a traditional calendar.
Under some models, all students and teachers go through the same schedule simultaneously.
This, however, is not what the study group was discussing Thursday night, as it would do nothing to reduce crowding at GCHS. Instead, the group talked about breaking the student body and the staff into three or four tracks, each with its own calendar, so there always would be one track on break.
Associate Principal Mark Ronn, who studied year-round schooling several years ago under former Superintendent Jim Lentz, said one of the biggest advantages of year-round schooling plans, in general, relates to academics. While students tend to lose during summer much of what they learned in the school year, they retain more when each break is only three or four weeks long.
"There's no longer a 12-week chance to forget," he said.
However, members of the study group discussed several drawbacks they saw to the idea, especially under the multi-track model GCHS would need to use if it wanted to reduce crowding.
First, it wouldn't necessarily be strictly a GCHS calendar. Ronn said most school districts implement the plan district-wide, so families with children at different schools can have all their children on the same schedule, but school board member Jeff Crist was uncertain about that idea.
"If we make it district-wide, we're changing what doesn't need to be changed for about 70 percent of our enrollment," he said.
There also were scheduling concerns cited by administrators.
It would make it difficult for students to take dual-enrollment courses at Garden City Community College, and seniors would graduate at different times during the year, Ronn said, so some schedules would be much better than others for college-bound students.
The plan also would split teachers, along with students, among the tracks, so subjects that only have one or two teachers would be limited to the tracks when those teachers worked. The opportunities for electives, therefore, would decrease unless the school district were able to hire more teachers, Ronn said.
That especially would be a problem in what are known as "career clusters," career-focused course sequences that must be taken in order, Principal James Mireles said. The district receives extra funds based on its student enrollment in these vocational programs, according to Deputy Superintendent Steve Karlin.
Teachers in the same department can't necessarily switch off in teaching these classes, Mireles said, because they are not "highly-qualified" in all these areas, a requirement stemming from the No Child Left Behind Act that requires teachers to pass exams in each area they teach.
The challenge of hiring teachers would increase as well, at a time when Kansas Education Commissioner Alexa Posny told a legislative committee on Tuesday that the state is facing a record shortage of teachers.
The schedule likely would put teachers on multiple contract periods, instead of the current August-to-July contract for all, Karlin said. If a teacher resigned at the end of his contract, the position would start school again in three or four weeks, leaving the district little time to find a replacement, he said.
In addition, the calendar wouldn't coincide with when most aspiring teachers graduate from college, or when others might leave current jobs and move to Garden City, Superintendent Rick Atha said.
Then there is the issue of money. Although there wouldn't be the major capital expense of a building project, operational costs would increase if students were in the schools every week of the year, and there also would be more transportation needs, Ronn said.
Besides these concerns, study group members were unsure whether the year-round plan would solve the concerns with the GCHS facility.
It would do nothing to improve conditions in the science labs or locker rooms, for instance, but it also was difficult for the group to say whether they really would have more classroom space.
Now, there are seven trailers outside the main building that house 11 classrooms, and the study group would like to eliminate them, along with giving the 14 traveling teachers, who push class materials on a cart, their own classrooms.
But study group Co-Chairman Craig Wheeler said this would not really be possible under the scheduling system because there wouldn't be any more classrooms. And sharing would be difficult, too, because although a teacher would be on a four-week break for part of a counterpart's 12-weeks of classes, he wouldn't be on break for the entire session, he said.
Atha said the plan seemed to have enough problems that it could be seen by taxpayers as leverage to get a bond issue passed.
"It seems like this could create a lot of pain, and then we would come and vote a bond," he said. "I don't like that idea. It seems dishonest."
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