Aug. 9 is too early for summer's end

Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

6/08/05

What happened to summer?

When I was a kid, summer was when time stood still. It was a lazy expanse of days spent outside, tossing a tennis ball against a wall, riding a bike or fishing at the lake. Summer seemed to never end.

I suppose summers like that still exist somewhere. But not here.

Here we are, barely into summer — which is marked by me now as the day the kids get out of school — and already I'm sensing that time is tight.

The calendar of too-few weeks is already filling up. Soccer camp. Family trip. A plethora of organized activities that move time along smartly, whether you like it or not, until suddenly it's over.

On Aug. 9.

That's a crazy time to call it quits on summer. But that's when it ends for the parents of school-age children here.

I suppose that's the real problem. The summers I grew up with were three months long. But somehow, a month got whittled away.

Where did it go? Fall?

I don't think you can call the second week in August the beginning of Fall, certainly not in South Florida.

Labor Day weekend used to be a reliable marker as the end of summer, a final fling in the early days of September before you surrendered to another school cycle.

But these days, Labor Day is already a time for a school progress report. Public schools begin classes on Aug. 10. By Labor Day, kids already have four weeks of school under their belts.

Colleges, too, are trampling on summer. University of Florida, for example, runs two summer sessions for its students, encouraging students to take some classes during the summer, rather than in the fall and spring terms.

As a result, many high school seniors went packing off to college within a few days of their graduation.

Summer is getting trampled. Does anybody care?

I typed in "save the summer" in a Google search, and at first, all that came back was the Save the Summer Act of 2004, which dealt with saving summer jobs for college students, not saving the actual months of summer.

A search under "summer preservation" yielded a National Park Service project to preserve natural and historic resources, not time.

I had feared that summer was being stolen and nobody seemed to mind, until I dug a little deeper and discovered "Saving Summer: Lessons Learned," a report filed last year by Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the Texas Comptroller.

The report showed that starting the school year in August has become a national trend, but that there are efforts in some states to re-evaluate it.

"Schools are providing approximately the same number of instructional days as they did in 1949, while the school year has gotten two weeks longer," the report found.

The data on Florida showed that in 2003, 34 out of 67 districts in the state started school in the week of Aug. 4. In contrast, Virginia has a law that prevents schools from starting before September.

"The reasons usually cited for earlier start dates include the desirability of administering semester exams before the winter break and maximizing the number of instructional days before standardized achievement testing in the spring," the report said. "As testing has become more a high-stakes affair, both in terms of student academics and funding, this has emerged as a significant issue."

And that means non-standardized summers for my kids, an end to endless summers.