Summer break should be eliminated

Summer break should be spread throughout the school year, in order to eliminate learning loss, and the painful return to school at the end of the long break. Photo Courtesy of Trey Ratcliff, Creative Commons License

Trey Ratcliff

Summer break should be spread throughout the school year, in order to eliminate learning loss, and the painful return to school at the end of the long break. Photo Courtesy of Trey Ratcliff, Creative Commons License

William Henry, Staff Writer
March 18, 2022

What do long weekends, winter, spring and summer break all have in common? The painful return to status quo after the conclusion of vacation. Shifting the school year calendar to year round will eliminate the pain that comes from returning to school after long breaks.

This annoyance is relatively minimal at the end of weekends, especially for people who don’t completely cease all work. This way they are able to rest in some sense, but also stay “in shape” to continue to learn when returning to school.

Even though classrooms slowly build up to working again at full speed at the end of summer break, the transition back to school is extremely difficult considering students have most likely taken their longest break from school in a while. Students won’t be used to going to school, so making it a part of their daily schedule again will be difficult. An analogy can be made to exercise: if you don’t exercise for a period of time, you won’t be used to exercise, and will experience pain trying to get back into shape. The same principle follows for school, and without consistent efforts in learning, our minds will “fall out of shape”.

Returning to school will also be difficult right after long breaks during the school year, such as spring break. After such breaks, learning resumes at the pace that it ended before the break. There is no gradual build of working at full speed again, like there was at the end of summer. 

The removal of summer break from the school year will benefit students and teachers who struggle with returning to school after a long period of rest. Alternative options for break periods for students include having more two week long periods of break throughout the school year. School weeks might also be reduced to three or four days. 

In addition, the loss of student knowledge as a result of not learning for a two month period will be avoided with this new policy. According to an article cited by Brookings, “students’ achievements scores declined over summer vacation by one month’s worth of school year learning.”

There are multiple perspectives to this issue however, which makes finding a solution difficult. By looking forward to long breaks, people have a goal to focus on, making school for them easier. The problem with this reliance is that when the much desired break ends, we are left in withdrawal from the break that we again crave.