Carol Slough has a problem. Her two daughters are so eager to attend school they even enjoy going in the middle of summer when many kids are sitting around the pool. “They are ready to go back to school at the end of July. They don’t miss the summer break,” says Slough. And her children don’t get bored or exhausted from too much class time. “I never get the sense they can’t go another day.”

This may not sound like much of a problem. But it’s her children’s happiness with Kenwood Elementary School in Champaign that may lead to difficulties this fall. That school’s unusual approach to scheduling, called year-round education, is the reason Slough’s daughters are in classes in July and don’t suffer from end-of-year burnout. Under the year-round system, students attend class in blocks of nine-week stretches. After each block, they get a three-week break. Slough and her girls like it. But this month, the oldest is moving up to middle school, which operates under the traditional three-month summer vacation schedule. With the girls on two schedules, and a kindergartner too, Slough and her husband will have to scramble to keep up with them. But she’s hopeful. Parents are talking about pushing the middle school to shift to the year-round system.

That would follow a small, but growing trend in Illinois and across the nation.

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Last year, 36 Illinois public schools used a year-round system, up from 11 in 1993. And when districts try it, they like it. Champaign School District 4 also converted Barkstall Elementary School to a year-round schedule. Springfield School District 186, meanwhile, is adding the fifth-grade to its year-round school, Southern View Elementary, and converted another elementary school to year-round this summer.

Advocates of the trend argue schools need to take fresh approaches to scheduling, in much the same way they've appropriated new technolo-gies into teaching. "You can do a lot of creative things when you are talk-ing about time," says Molly Carroll, a former Chicago public schoolteacher and a board member of the National Association for Year-Round Education. Carroll contends that changing the calendar can enable educators to devote valuable time to slower students, while still encourag-ing those children who are doing well.

This new approach to the academic calendar may not work for all schools. Proponents admit it takes preparation and requires the strong support of parents, teachers and administrators. Cost can be a factor, too, because summer classes would require schools in older buildings to invest in air conditioning.

Nevertheless, according to the year-round education association, the number of schools nationwide that have changed their academic calen- dars has grown by 600 percent since 1985. In the 1999 school year, 2,880 schools with a little more than two million students had reconfigured their school year calendars.

Part of the reason for this has to do with an increase in the number of students some schools are required to serve. In California, with 1,542 year-round schools, educators must rotate students in the same grade in and out of classrooms in older buildings throughout the year. So one group of fourth-graders may be on vacation while another group is in class.

But in Illinois, more often parents and teachers are weighing the educational benefits of year-round schooling.

The term year-round schooling scares some people because it conjures up images of students — and teachers — sitting in classrooms 365 days a year. But the phrase is a misnomer, say proponents, who prefer the term "balanced calendar." In fact, students in schools like Champaign's Kenwood attend classes for the standard 180 days a year. They also have extended breaks in the sum-mer and around the winter holidays.

But the short-session, short-break program addresses two longstanding problems in the traditional schedule, says Carroll. Less time is wasted every September teaching students what they have forgotten over the summer. And students who start falling behind early in the school year won't have to wait until the following summer to take a makeup class. Instead, the mini-breaks allow those students to take half-day remediation classes. Further, the three-week breaks can be useful for students who are already on top of the material. They can study advanced courses or a subject outside the core curriculum.

Kenwood switched to the balanced calendar in the 1995-1996 school year. Les Huddle, principal of the kindergarten through fifth-grade school, says teachers and administra-tive staff researched the concept and then sold it to parents and the district superintendent.

Huddle says he sees improvements in test scores, discipline and the general mood at school. Students, he says, are enthusiastic about being there, even in the spring months when children usually are getting antsy to be outside. "The atmosphere is posi-tive. I roam the halls in May and there's lots of energy, which can be unusual" under a traditional sched-ule, says Huddle.

He says teachers prefer the program, too. "For teachers, this is much less stress and burnout. They work hard for nine weeks, then relax for three. There is less review and more new instruction."

The balanced-calendar program has its critics, though. Many parents second Carol Slough's concern about conflicting schedules. And Slough has been disappointed with the enrich-ment courses. She says the choices were few, and not many parents were sending their kids to those extra classes that were offered.

Advocates acknowledge the bal-anced- calendar programs lean toward remediation, and the discovery pro-grams for advanced students aren't given as much focus. "More work is needed to determine how this will benefit those students who go into enrichment," says Delwyn Harnisch, a former professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Harnisch has worked with schools throughout the state that have shifted to a balanced calendar. He has also conducted studies of the Champaign and Springfield programs. His three-year evaluation of Kenwood, running through the 1998 school year, did not find significant improvements in test scores, but teachers, parents and staff were positive. The mood in the school was upbeat, children liked going to school and communication between parents and teachers improved, according to his evaluation.

Harnisch sees another reason to consider revising the academic calendar. "The [traditional] calendar was designed for the Agriculture Age so children could work on the farm. Now we are in the Information Age. The child must learn how to synthe-size and use information," he says.

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Of course, there are costs. And Harnisch has made some calculations there, too. He reports that the Kenwood school board decided to invest $420,000 in central air conditioning. And the utility bills climbed from $27,580 the year prior to the schedule change to $41,537 in the 1996-1997 school year. Huddle argues the money was well-invested because the building can now be used all year by the community. Harnisch conducted a similar evaluation at Springfield’s Southern View school, with similar results. Jeanette Krofchick has taught at that “small, close-knit” school for 15 years. “I recommend [a balanced calendar]. I don’t want to go back to the traditional,” she says. She cites another efficiency of the mini-breaks: It’s easier to schedule doctor and dentist visits, which cuts time off from school. Though the year-round program is growing in Illinois, nearly half the schools using a modified academic calendar — 16 to be exact — are located in Chicago. But that district’s chief executive officer, Paul Vallas, is a critic of the year-round concept because he believes it merely rearranges the standard number of in-school days. He supports extending the school year by another 30 to 40 days. In order to reach his goal, he’s been expanding and extending summer school. Chicago’s Summer Bridge program sends about 25,000 students to school, while another 170,000 are given take-home lessons through the Step Ahead program. Vallas contends he’s not using a balanced calendar, except in some crowded schools. He credits the five-year rise in test scores in Chicago to all the programs offered in its schools, including day care and after-school tutoring. But advocate Molly Carroll believes Vallas is merely concerned about the connotations of the term “year-round.” Meanwhile, she argues, he’s actually building a year-round program with periods of recovery and discovery. Chicago may call its program a bridge, she says, but so many kids are going to school in the summer that the schedule resembles a year-round system. “I’m sure [Vallas] doesn’t want to see that phrase in a headline. It can upset people. But I think that’s what they’re doing without labeling it.” Carroll and Vallas could both be right, in that Chicago is developing a new way to use the school calendar for today’s urban children. And, after all, labels and perceptions are critical in selling something new. Springfield teaching veteran Krofchick puts her own spin on negative perceptions associated with year-round schooling. With children on different schedules, she suggests, a Champaign parent like Slough has the chance to spend time with each child individually. And when Krofchick’s first-graders wonder why they are in class when their friends are playing, she emphasizes how special they are. “We promote the positive aspects. I say, ‘We go to school when no one else does.’”

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