Students need a break in order to rejuvenate for the following school year. School itself used to move at a slower pace. Students were afforded more breaks during the school day including a full period lunch. With the importance of state tests and the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) requirements the demands on students and the curriculum has increased. There is little free time, few study halls and few schools that provide a full lunch period. Kids need time to unwind, and the short breaks in a full year schedule do not provide that opportunity.
The school summer vacation provides many jobs and money for the economy. Students join summer camp programs, sports clinics, swim camps and even enrichment programs. Families plan summer vacations with the option of available dates. If the school year was extended, families would struggle to find places to send their children during the breaks and would be very limited in making vacation plans. Parents could be faced with missing work or paying for child care, which might be harder to arrange with several small breaks versus two sustained months.
Many teachers use the summer months to tweak and plan new lessons. Teachers can read books, complete research, review curriculum changes and prepare lesson plans. State tests also place more demands on teachers in terms of lesson planning. Squeezing in concepts becomes necessary as the deadline for standardized tests approaches. With short breaks throughout the year, all of these tasks would become more difficult. Results of these tests have become increasingly more important, so as a result, teachers need to prepare more.
Schools need to be maintained. The summer vacation provides time for the grounds and buildings of schools to be prepared and maintained. New computers, sports fields and facilities are often scheduled over the summer months once the budget has been voted on and passed. With shorter breaks during the year, these needed renovations and projects would be more difficult to schedule and could interfere with the educational process. If a new computer lab were to be installed, the students might be forced to be without computers during the school year, if the school ran on the extended year schedule.