Revamping the school year
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t was the English theologian Richard Hooker who opined that "Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better." He might as well have been talking about Utah public education.
Last week, some lawmakers and a State School Board member started sniping at each other over a proposal for year-round schools in kindergarten through 12th grade. The lawmakers involved -- Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, and Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper -- think the proposal, still in general form, has promise. But school board member Debra Roberts called it "dreamland" and called for "realism" on the subject.
Them's fightin' words down at the Capitol.
In March, we wrote with optimism about a report by the K-16 Alliance's Special Task Force on Teacher Shortages. The K-16 Alliance is a group of legislators and members of the state Board of Education, state Board of Regents and the governor's office. The group had been investigating solutions for, among other things, low teacher pay, crowded classrooms and the desperate need to hire more qualified teachers for Utah's schools. One of their ideas was to lengthen the school day and to adopt an across-the-board, K-12, year-round trimester school schedule. It would accomplish various goals, including:
* Teachers, who now work 190 days on the "traditional" schedule, could extend their annual employment to 228 days per year, along with a commensurate bump in salary. It has been our experience that lots of teachers complain about having summers off and foregoing the income they would earn by remaining in the classroom; this would salve that irritant.
* Schools would be used more efficiently instead of sitting idle three months of the year.
There would, however, be an extra expense to install air conditioning in schools that don't have it now. And electric bills would increase, since lighting and the aforementioned air conditioning would obviously run monthly bills higher than normal during the previously vacant summer months.
* Students in junior high and high schools could choose which two trimesters each year they would prefer to attend; as a result, class sizes would be reduced. Or, high schoolers could choose to take three trimesters each year and graduate early.
We still think those proposals are worth investigating further. Roberts may have a point when she says it might not work for rural districts -- that remains to be seen, as does the viability of the year-round blueprint in urban districts. But for her to use such damning language to describe the trimester idea is counterproductive; it only angers lawmakers, who teachers and parents and students depend on to appropriate money to fuel the state's system of public education.
It's clear doing things the same old way isn't going to dramatically increase teacher pay, reduce class sizes or lessen the need for new buildings to house the expected 14,000 new students each year -- over and above current enrollments -- over the coming decade. As we've said before, Utah needs to hire an additional 700 teachers each year to keep pace.
Subjects don't get much more serious than the quality of our children's education. We hope state leaders will meet in good faith to further discuss the options this proposal offers. It would be a shame to see it scuttled not for lack of merit, but out of stubbornness.
