How Can You Help Stop the School Year from Starting Earlier and Earlier in August?
- Volunteer to Be on Your Local School Calendar Committee.
Now is the time to call your school district and volunteer to be part of the calendar committee. This will give you a voice in the calendar creation.
To volunteer, call your school district office and ask with whom you should talk.
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Talk to Your Local School Board Members.
Call or write your school board member and ask him or her to consider pushing back the school start date. Consider including a sample calendar that meets the state requirements.
Don't forget to thank your school board representative for their hard work and offer your assistance in either gathering data to support your later school start date
request or helping with a survey of parents in the district.
(Don't worry....just email us at SaveTNSummers@gmail.com and we will be happy to
help you!)
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Help Gather Petitions to Share with Your Legislators
In order to vote for an issue legislators must know that the issue is important to those who elected them to office. An easy way to do this is to provide legislators with postcard petitions signed by your friends, neighbors and colleagues. If you would like for us to mail a packet of postcards to you email us at SaveTNSummers@gmail.com and we will send postcards to you. All you need to do is distribute the postcards and we do the rest! An easy way to make an enormous difference!
July 1, 2011
Hearing talk that a longer school year and school day is the key to increased educational success? Not the first plan of action according to internationally acclaimed researcher Dr. Gene V. Glass and his report for the National Education Policy Center.
Click here to read the report.
(Review of Successful, Safe, and Healthy Students)
April 24, 2011
Is your district considering a year-round or balanced calendar?
Read the following articles to learn why districts are dropping the concept as year-round or balanced calendars fail to live up to their claims of academic greatness.
Salt Lake City school to drop year-round schedule, The Salt Lake Tribune,
March 22, 2011
Salt Lake City School District is ditching the year-round calendar. Next year, the district’s six year-round elementaries — Bennion, Franklin, Meadowlark, Parkview, Rose Park and Whittier — will switch to a traditional school year....The change means all elementary and secondary schools will have a common calendar, sharing start and end dates and breaks. As a result, the district estimates it will save $128,000 a year in busing costs, consolidated teacher training and other expenses....The six elementaries are all Title I schools that, years ago, chose the extended-year schedule, which features three two-week breaks throughout the year, to see if it would boost student achievement. But when the district recently compared test scores in those schools with its other Title I elementaries, it found no benefit. In fact, students in the year-round schools had slightly lower scores in some areas.
Hardy to drop year-round class schedule, Times Free Press,
April 24, 2011
Hamilton County’s venture into year-round schools will end this year after a nearly seven-year experiment that neither teachers nor parents fully embraced, school officials say. Hardy Elementary School will start the 2011-12 school year with a traditional August-to-May class schedule. Hardy adopted year-round school in the 2004-05 school year. Officials hoped the six-weeks-on, three-weeks-off pattern that ran year-round would beef up instruction for students who sometimes lost ground during summer break. But in the years since, school officials say, leadership and teachers left the school as parents lost interest in the year-round approach. Last year the school failed to reach federal benchmarks for academic achievement, known as Adequate Yearly Progress.
RECENT HEADLINES
Salt Lake City school to drop year-round schedule, The Salt Lake Tribune
- 3/22/11 -
Hardy to drop year-round class schedule, Times Free Press
- 4/24/11 -
Palo Alto takes pre-break finals off table in latest calendar proposal
- 12/4/10 -
Parents' timing tardy in getting kids to Memphis City Schools
- 9/4/10 -
Editorial: Heat re-ignites school debate
- 8/11/10 -
Save Tennessee Summers is a non-profit, statewide coalition of parents, teachers and community members disappointed with the ever-earlier start to the school year. Our mission is to educate consumers of the education system, taxpayers and other interested people about the negative impact the early-August school start date and nontraditional school calendars have on our students, teachers and families. It is our hope that we can work with parents and school districts to help establish educationally and fiscally sound school calendars; a school calendar that allows more money to flow into teachers' salaries, classroom supplies and educational services ... without a heavier tax burden on Tennessee families.
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