Illustration by Karly Andersen
After two years of pandemic-induced learning loss, school leaders across the region are increasingly turning to an educational innovation that has traditionally been off-limits in Virginia — sending students to school year-round.
In July, Hopewell became the first Virginia school district to shift to an 11-month calendar. For much of the fall, administrators at Richmond Public Schools engaged in a citywide listening tour, asking families, teachers and community groups what they think of a similar shift after initially shooting down an earlier proposal in March of last year.
Leaders from Goochland County spent much of the last year entertaining the idea before tabling the discussion in November, while Chesterfield County already has two elementary schools on a year-round schedule.
If the agrarian calendar was good enough for generations of children well into industrialization, why the big push to move away from it now?
The interest in year-round school stems from a combination of new state laws and an intensifying need for solutions to help students rebound from months lost to virtual instruction due to COVID-19. But the groundwork was laid well before the pandemic.
Beginning in the late 1980s, school districts were required to obtain a waiver from the Virginia Board of Education to begin school before Labor Day, but in 2019, the General Assembly passed legislation giving school districts far more flexibility in crafting their own calendars.
Following a 2012 study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) that found historically underperforming groups improving more rapidly in schools on extended-year calendars, the state began offering school districts grants to explore shifting to a year-round model. Minority students and those from low-income families in year-round programs all scored higher on state Standards of Learning assessments than peers on the traditional calendar, according to JLARC’s review.
Now that districts have both the state’s permission and the funding to consider new calendar approaches, many are doing just that.
In Richmond, the School Board has been debating the issue since first asking Superintendent Jason Kamras for year-round options in 2020.
Kamras’ team has been gathering reams of community feedback, asking groups about extending the year by two weeks, or making a more dramatic shift to an 11-month calendar running from Aug. 15 to June 29 with three one-week breaks between each quarter.
Those one-week “intersessions” ensure students still get time off, but in Richmond those weeks would also be used for targeted remediation to help students who are behind academically to catch up.
“Every time there is a decline, it correlates with the summer.” —Stephen A. Geyer, Goochland County Public Schools
The Richmond School Board voted down a proposal in the spring to shift to a year-round calendar during the current school year. When Kamras presented options in November, the board raised questions about how well the administration had surveyed the community, if the plan would improve student outcomes and if the district had the operational staff necessary to make it happen.
“Personally, I do favor the opportunity to at least try it, even if it has to be a pilot program to see how it works out,” Richmond City School Board Chairwoman Cheryl Burke says. “But change is hard.”
In mid-January, after Kamras presented survey results that found a majority didn’t support sending children to school year-round, the School Board voted to stick to a traditional calendar.
“I continue to believe we need more instructional time, but an extended-school-year calendar isn’t the only way to achieve that,” Kamras said late last year. “We can also explore more robust summer programming, Saturday academies and extended-day options.”
While school boards are understandably hesitant to mess with cherished traditions like summer vacation, there is broad consensus among educators that students return to school each fall having forgotten some of what they learned the previous year.
In October 2021, Goochland County Public Schools Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Stephen A. Geyer presented a chart of the district’s student test scores going back to 2014, showing the annual “summer slide.”
“Every time there is a decline, it correlates with the summer,” Geyer said. “We see great student progress … from fall to spring, and then we see it dip over summer.”
Isaiah Grant, a seventh grader at Carter G. Woodson Middle School, participates in a 2021 STEAM competition at Hopewell High School. (Photo courtesy Hopewell City Public Schools)
If Hopewell is any indicator, getting community buy-in on a new calendar may require making sure people know they still get a summer break.
“Don’t name it year-round school. When you name it that, there is a natural assumption that you don’t stop,” says Byron Davis, director of balanced calendar implementation for Hopewell City Public Schools. “And nobody likes that idea.”
Hopewell became the first Virginia school division to shift to an 11-month calendar this school year, and it received $1.5 million from the state to implement the new calendar across its five traditional schools, a preschool and an alternative school.
The 2021-22 school year in Hopewell began July 26. The year is split into four nine-week quarters, with three two-week intersessions at the end of the first, third and fourth quarters. Students will have a shorter summer break, running from June 9 to July 26, with an optional intersession running from June 20 to July 1.
Because Hopewell’s students are in school for the state-mandated 180 days of instruction during the nine-week quarters, intersession classes are optional, noncredit courses, and they look more like specialty summer camp offerings than summer school.
“There is some pressure. Everyone has an opinion.” —Byron Davis, Hopewell City Public Schools
Traditional summer school or “credit recovery” courses tend to strip an academic subject of all the frills and distill the content down to a handful of core concepts, Davis says. The goal of intersession courses is to avoid that.
“We are really trying to make these be an enrichment opportunity,” Davis says. “In general, students that get assigned for remediation get stuck in a rut of always being in remediation and don’t get the opportunity to experience enrichment things that really allow you to grow.”
During the fall intersession, options included a disc golf class, during which elementary school students use drones, boomerangs and simple machines as they learn the rules and strategies of disc golf.
One of the high school options was an economics course that taught students about investing, and athletics coaches held leadership classes.
Six months into its experiment, Davis says the change in Hopewell has been positive, but school leaders pondering a calendar shift must be ready to answer lots of questions.
“There is some pressure,” he says. “Everyone has an opinion.”
