School bells ring out early end to summer

BACK TO SCHOOL: One in a series

Saturday, September 04, 2004

By Monica Haynes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Try to remember the kind of September when students never returned to school until after Labor Day.

Try to remember and if you remember, then your school days are probably a long time gone.

A number of schools in the Pittsburgh region have already been in session for nearly two weeks.

Students in the Penn Hills, East Allegheny and Duquesne City districts have been dragging themselves and their backpacks to class since Aug. 25. McKeesport Area School District students returned to school Aug. 26, as did most of the students attending Catholic schools in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Some starting dates in the diocese may vary because there are schools in six counties involved, said Superintendent Robert Paserba.

Why do some districts like to get a jump on the school year, while others, like Mt. Lebanon and Gateway, prefer the traditional post-Labor Day start?

Well, it's not rocket science or even algebra.

In Pennsylvania, school districts are required to give students 180 days of instruction. Teachers must be in school for at least 189 days. How to fit those mandates into a school calendar is left up to the discretion and planning skills of each district.

"It's really based on when do we want to be out of school," said Matthew Cummings, spokesman for the Penn Hills School District.

From there, the district factors in holidays, snow days and teacher training days and whatever else needs to be scheduled.

Last year, we budgeted three snow make-up days and we used those three days," Cummings said.

This year, the district has scheduled six make-up days. The first make-up day is Presidents Day in February and there are five make-up days around Easter.

If it doesn't snow, the students get those days off.

"If we need them, we have them," Cummings said. "If not, we have a nice break in the spring."

Prior to 19th-century school reforms, rural school districts traditionally scheduled breaks in the spring and fall so students could help out on the farm. These were the busiest seasons for farmers.

That meant students in rural areas attended school during the summer. And students in urban areas, like Philadelphia and New York, went to school almost year round. In the 1840s, schools were open 240 to 250 days a year.

"These were substantial terms. These weren't add-ons to the school year," said Ken Golden, author of "School's In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools."

"What I basically argue in the book is that we've sort of mythologized summer vacation as being a natural product of a 19th-century agrarian lifestyle," Golden said.

It was not.

The school reforms brought about during that period sought to increase the number of rural school days while scaling back the urban school calendar.

Reformers viewed school during summer as of somewhat lesser quality than other times of the year. They believed a break during summer would give teachers and students a chance to renew themselves.

The reformers noticed, too, that school attendance was down during summer. The expansion of the middle class meant vacations were no longer limited to the rich."I see summer vacation as a conscious creation of school reformers," Gold said.Several districts have shortened their summer vacations by pushing up their starting dates this year because Labor Day is not until Sept. 6.

"We typically begin the Wednesday before Labor Day," said Tina Vojtko, spokeswoman for the North Hills School District.

This year, however, North Hills students went back Monday. Their last day is June 9.

"We begin looking at drafts of [next year's] calendar approximately in January," Vojtko said.

The calendar is developed with the input of elementary and secondary administrators and is then passed on to unions to make sure it's in keeping with their contracts. Next it goes to school board members.

The initial draft of the 2004-05 school calendar had the starting date a week earlier.

"There were some concerns about weather possibly being too hot."

Pittsburgh Public Schools students, who usually return to school after Labor Day, headed back Thursday.

"In recent years we have been going back the day after Labor Day," said district spokeswoman Pat Crawford. "This year, Labor Day is quite late and that would have pushed our end of school year far into June if we didn't start Sept. 2."

Gateway usually starts before Labor Day. However, this year the school board approved a Sept. 7 start because of renovations being carried out in the district.

That's also the case in Mt. Lebanon, which has the same starting date as Gateway. Three elementary schools in the district were renovated over the summer.

"Starting after Labor Day gives us a little more time to finish up work before the beginning of school," said Cissy Bowman, the district's spokeswoman.

Dr. Jacquelyn Webb, superintendent of the Duquesne City School District, said her students traditionally return to school before the September holiday.

Webb, who develops the school calendar with input from her building principal, said she tries to coordinate the district's opening day with surrounding districts.

"We try to have a common beginning because at some time during the year we want common professional days," Webb said.

Schools in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh usually begin the last week of August, Paserba said.

"That's the norm for us regardless of when Labor Day falls," he said.

The diocese's school calendar includes some of the same national holidays as the public schools, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day. However, it also has scheduled religious holidays that public schools do not.

For the past few decades, Upper St. Clair students have returned to school a week before Labor Day. The only exceptions have been because of construction, said Superintendent Dr. James Lombardo.

"I think part of that's due to the longer-than-average student school year that we have," he said.

Upper St. Clair students have 183 days of instruction scheduled. There are 195 teacher days.

In Vermont, where Lombardo was previously superintendent, many districts scheduled breaks in February and April.

"It was a holdover from when so many children worked on family farms," he said.

There are a number of states in which big business has held sway with school calendars.

Several states have passed legislation prohibiting school districts from starting school before Labor Day, so that students will be available to work an extra week or so.

In Virginia, it's called the "King's Dominion" law after the popular amusement park, which pushed for the 1986 legislation.

Park officials argued that students returning to school before Labor Day were shortening the summer vacation season, which in turn was killing the tourism industry.

It also gave them the much-needed student work force for a little bit longer.

Other states with school start legislation include Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

In the 2005-06 school year, North Carolina students will begin the mandatory post-Labor Day start.

In Pennsylvania, similar legislation has been proposed, said Tim Allwein, the Pennsylvania School Board Association's assistant executive director for governmental and member relations.

"The push was to require that school could not start before Labor Day," Allwein said. "We opposed it, obviously. It's always been our feeling that it should be up to each district to set its own calendar."

(Monica Haynes can be reached at mhaynes@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1660.