By Vincent Bottaro With the release of all these new updating schedules during this pandemic, it may be time to wonder if we should consider other options for our school in general. Another option for our school to use would be to make the switch to a year round schedule as opposed to the current 3 month long summer schedule. There are many arguments for this, and it seems like an interesting idea. The agrarian schedule that involves a 3 month summer was originally introduced so that all the farmers in school could go home and help pick crops since summer is when most plants are ripe. This schedule worked very well when everyone was farmers, but nowadays most students, at least in the CV area, don’t work on their farm during the summer. Another thing to consider about this 3 month break is the knowledge displacement. Over half a million students reported an average of a 25% loss of what they learned last year. Multiple weeks are used at the beginning of the year to catch students up on what they forgot, and that is valuable teaching time during an already rushed class. But don’t worry about not getting a summer vacation. There are a couple different options for the schedules, with the most popular one being 60 days in school, and then 20 days off. So it's about 3 months on, and then 3 weeks off. The second most popular option is 45 days in school, and then 15 off. There are other options, but these are the most widely used. These days ultimately end up falling around winter break as well as spring break, so instead of one week off there will be three. And you will still have the same amount of time in school, because there will still be 180 days of instruction by teachers, which is the same as an agrarian schedule. While preparing to go back to in-person school, consider the possible idea of getting more constant breaks throughout the entire school year as opposed to one single long break that can be detrimental to retaining knowledge. Sources: https://www.brookings.edu/research/summer-learning-loss-what-is-it-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/fa/yr/guide.asp#:~:text=Both%20traditional%20and%20some%20year,have%20180%20days%20of%20instruction.&text=The%20most%20typical%20instructional%2Fvacation,popular%20is%20the%2045%2F15. https://www.verywellfamily.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-year-round-school-621001 If you want to write for the Crescent Crier, we would love to see you at one of our virtual meetings, which are every Wednesday at 1:30pm! To come to a meeting, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/TrQ5PqFcDqeE2yiB9, and we’ll send you a link ASAP. If you would like to submit a single article - or anything else like creative writing, an opinion, an art piece, photo or photo series, or something else entirely - then you can do that using this form: https://forms.gle/WAHSoWJuVwK3q5du6. If you want to contact us for any reason, you can email
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