Should The United States Increase Multitrack Year-Round Education?
Year-Round Education (YRE) has been a large topic of discussion for more than a century (Pederson, 2012). The difference between traditional school schedules and year-round school schedules is that there is no long summer break, instead, students and staff have more frequent breaks lasting no more than eight weeks (Gerard, 2007). Although, not all YRE schools schedules are multitrack, it does have many benefits. Education has been important to society for over 100 years (Pederson, 2012). In the past, education was controlled by local districts and parents. (O'Sullivan, 2013). Therefore, the time children took off from learning was arranged around when the children were needed. More than a century ago many people wanted their children to attend the school with the greatest amount of academic days. In other words, schools with the least amount of academic days were thought to be the least academically beneficial (Pederson, 2012). Although many parents preferred their children to attend a school
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Each group follows a different schedule. Therefore, one or more tracks are on vacation at any given time (Gerard, 2007). This idea was originally implemented in order to control overcrowding. However, multi-track scheduling has been proven to help in other ways. Such as, usage of the schools all year long (Gerard, 2007). Multitrack scheduling provides the ability to educate more students without the means of building a new school (Gerard, 2007). For example, in a school that holds 750 students at one time if they switched to multitrack scheduling using four groups could comfortably educate 1000 students (Morton, 1994). Multitrack scheduling makes the school administrators and teachers jobs harder, however, more frequent vacations help to reduce administrative and teacher “burnout” (Opheim, Mohajer, Read,