Hopewell Public Schools Blazing a Trail for At-Risk Children
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9 responses to “Hopewell Public Schools Blazing a Trail for At-Risk Children”
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Virginia Beach experimented with year-round school in some school districts during the early to mid 1970s. Since I was in elementary school at the time I do not know the details of why they stopped the experiment.
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They did indeed, but as you state, only in a few schools. Year round is touted as a way to break the cycle of teaching and learning failures of and by at-risk kids. I hope this makes strides in that direction.
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I think it has promise. A friend I had at the time who went to one of the year-round schools did not like it very much, but I think his parents did.
Scheduling year-round school it is not very hard at all. It boils down to adjusting the number and length of the “breaks” between grading periods. Summer break is shortened considerably, an Autumn break is added and Winter and Spring breaks are each lengthened a bit.
I think my friend had a break of between two and three weeks between each nine-week grading period.
EDIT: I just checked Hopewell’s schedule, and they did not set it up quite so equally. Thanksgiving Break and Spring Break are each very short, with longer Winter and Summer breaks.
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They probably had a lot of non-airconditioned schools. I know that Prince William County schools had non-airconditioned schools as late as 1991.
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Yes they did. I attended one air-conditioned school during my eleven years in the Virginia Beach City public school system. It was a “Junior High School”, for the 8th and 9th grades.
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Well done. Would not have known this.
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As I recall, Fairfax County Public Schools did this for a number of years until the Great Recession caused financial cutbacks. Since FPCS had to change the admission rules for TJHSST, it apparently didn’t work. But I bet the people in charge got a promotion.
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Year round schooling is one thing. Maximizing the use of daily instructional hours is far more important. I tracked it one year at Briar Woods. I was shocked how many hours of the school year were simply wasted on things not related to learning. Hours that added up to days.
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It has been a long time since the children needed to spend the summer months in the fields on the family farm, the origin of our standard schedule. And it was despicable that we let the vacation industry fight to maintain this approach (Labor Day law). This new schedule is long overdue. Another location that toyed with this was the small city of Buena Vista, but not sure how that turned out.
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