Short School Days Hurt Child, Parents
For most students in Spokane public schools, school’s out on Friday, June 13, at 11:30 a.m. - leaving working parents once again scrambling for child care that afternoon. Before school reconvenes next fall, we have a simple question on behalf of all working parents: Can schools please come up with a schedule that reflects contemporary reality?
We continue a schedule designed for farm families that needed their children to be home by midafternoon to milk cows, not watch “Rosie” and “Oprah.” Parents wind up rearranging their schedules to accommodate school breaks, holidays and conference weeks.
But it’s the professional planning days that release students two hours early eight days of the year that particularly drive working parents bonkers.
On a day when a high school student is excused at noon or an elementary student at 1 p.m., parents wind up patching together child care and supervision out of thin air. Positive alternatives, such as sports and the arts, are largely nonexistent in the community during those irregular two-hour blocks.
A few lucky parents have the flexibility to arrange their schedules around the school’s hours or dash out of work to pick up a child early. But many others are tied to cash registers at fast food outlets, hospital emergency rooms or classrooms at other schools and cannot leave. Their children may face loneliness, danger or simply the sort of aimless time that can inspire a kid’s truly bad choices.
Most parents do the best they can. But the economics of an employer’s demands register loudly, and a child’s small voice can be quickly drowned out.
Those early release days also slice into the child’s learning. They count toward the state’s legal 180-day requirement. Certainly, full days would be more productive.
Working parents, often teachers’ biggest fans, aren’t likely to quibble with teachers’ needs for planning and retraining. But school officials and working parents together could devise alternatives that would respect the colossal inconvenience these days create in families’ lives.
One solution might be to schedule planning days at the start of each semester, when families already anticipate breaks and community groups schedule kids’ activities.
This week, President Clinton called for U.S. schools to create longer school years. He believes that more school days would help America compete. (The only industrialized nation with a shorter school year than ours, he noted, is Belgium.) That’s not a bad idea. In the meantime, public schools could start by ensuring that each of their 180 days is actually a full one.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jamie Tobias Neely/For the editorial board