This summer has blown by, or has it?
If you look at the calendar, today is only Aug. 2. That means we should have about seven more weeks of summer, which is when the autumnal equinox is scheduled to occur.
My birthday occurs in early August. When I started school too long ago, we didn’t start school until the last week of August. So my birthday was never even close to the back-to-school season. My birthday parties were always at least two weeks before school started.
This year, Union Public School students will be heading back to the classrooms before my birthday. That would be a weird feeling for me, having my classroom celebrate my birthday during class.
While it would have been cool to have a birthday party with my classmates at school, I still much preferred not being in school.
As the start of school continues to get earlier and earlier, the question of year-round school comes up more and more. As we keep pushing the start of school back more and more, I wouldn’t be surprised if some school districts in the South consider it.
One of the main reasons I’ve always heard about why schools had summer breaks was so that school-aged children could help out on their farms during the summer.
However, a PBS news story from Sept. 4, 2014, kind of debunks that theory. The story titled “Agrarian roots? Think again. Debunking the myth of summer vacation’s origins” by Saskia de Melker and Sam Webber tries to shed more light on the subject.
“What school on the agrarian calendar actually looked like was a short winter term and a short summer term” said Kenneth Gold, a historian at the College of Staten Island. “And if you think about farming needs, that actually what makes sense.”
In this theory, school had a long spring break so that kids could help plant. And then, they had another long break in the fall so that they could bring in the harvest.
The story goes on to say that in urban areas, many families, especially wealthy families, left the city because of sweltering conditions. Remember, air conditioning wasn’t common until the late 20th century.
Since the wealthy families left the city during the summer heat, the schools decided to close for nearly three months.
If we did go back to a year-round calendar where the breaks were more spread out in the year, I don’t know what that would look like. I doubt that education systems would add more days to the school year. The summer break might be one month while you have two-week breaks between each of the other grading periods.
I still think August is too early to start back classes, but with the time constraints that the school districts have, I’m not sure there’s a way to avoid it.
Contact Brent at bmaze@-newtoncountyappeal.com.
