Robin L. Flanigan
Staff writer
9/1/2005

All seven Stack children are scheduled to start school Friday. And they're not happy about it.

"It's not a popular issue in our house," said dad Paul, whose brood attends West Irondequoit schools. "It's a big wrench in the works as far as going away and doing something over the Labor Day weekend. There has been much distress."

Though start dates are inching earlier nationwide, students in the West Irondequoit district, and in one Rochester charter school, are the only ones in Monroe County heading back to class this week.

A handful of districts begin Tuesday. The majority of districts return Wednesday, and several others — including the region's largest in Rochester and Greece — wait until next Thursday.

This marks the second consecutive year West Irondequoit is opening school before Labor Day. Last year, students went back two days before the holiday weekend.

The district has a 184-day school year, four days longer than the minimum set by the state. West Irondequoit officials mark the last day of testing on their calendars and work backward from there.

"We just believe our students need more time in school with their teachers," said district spokeswoman Carol Crumlish. "That's how they learn. That's how they get the best education."

The calendar allows West Irondequoit schools to close the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and protects spring break and Memorial Day if a snow makeup day must be scheduled.

'Save our summer'

School calendars can be a highly emotional subject. Parents across the country are forming grass-roots groups — Save Our Summers in North Carolina, Save Georgia Summers, Texans for a Traditional School Year are some — to protest early start dates. Seventy-one percent of the nation's public schools started classes before September last year, according to Market Data Retrieval, an education market research company in Connecticut. The efforts are yielding different results. Beginning in 2006, public schools in Minnesota must wait until after Labor Day to start classes. In Texas, however, despite strong legislative and voter support, a bill that would have required all 1,037 districts to wait until the Tuesday after Labor Day failed this summer.

As Michigan ponders the issue, a poll last week showed that nearly two-thirds of voters support a post-Labor Day opening, mostly to give families more time for summer vacations and to boost the state's tourism industry.

The traditional school calendar — originally designed for a long-gone agrarian society that needed children's help with spring plantings and fall harvests — still dominates, although many districts are starting earlier to increase the time teachers have to prepare students for standardized tests. Those tests are becoming increasingly important as states use them to measure progress on the federal No Child Left Behind program.

Changing plans

If things were different, Paul Stack would be taking his family to the Thousand Islands for a weekend of camping. Instead, the teacher at East Irondequoit's Eastridge High School — which starts classes next Thursday — is leaving behind much of the family and heading to the New Jersey shore with his two youngest sons, both of whom will miss the first day of first grade Friday but will be there Tuesday.

"I know that it's tough and it does affect people's lives and schedules, but I think it pays off in the long run," said Charles Perreaud, president of the West Irondequoit school board. "We're essentially getting started almost a week earlier than some other districts, and that has some value to it."

Andrew Brady, an incoming senior at Irondequoit High School, isn't complaining.

"I've really been in a routine from soccer for a couple of weeks now, so it's not that big of a deal," said the 16-year-old varsity soccer player, whose practices began in August and are scheduled over the weekend. "Next year I'll be going away a lot sooner for college anyways."

Kelly Ruster, on the other hand, is torn. She sees the benefit of sending her sixth- and seventh-grade daughters to school on Friday to get "those first-day jitters out of the way" but questions whether the district gets enough out of the deal to justify an early end to summer vacation.

"It's a Catch-22," she said. "You're never going to please all of the people all of the time."