The current school system that we have was made for farmers and, more specifically, giving their children time to help on the farms. In some cases this makes our current system archaic as a less than significant amount of the population in America farms anymore and so there is less need for a longer summer break. But what would a year round calendar look like? 

It would probably be a 45-45-45-45 split, where students attend school for 45 days and then get two weeks off. This model has a ton of upsides as it would still factor in the holidays and other short breaks like conferences, but would also allow students to retain information better as they no longer have a long stretch of the summer where they simply don’t learn anything and forget. Another reason this would be great is that students and staff would suffer less burnout, as instead of trudging through an entire 9 months, they would only have to go through 2 or 3 before the next major break and thus relieve themselves of a lot of the stress associated with school.

However, it would also have some drawbacks. For one, our society has already adapted this long summer break into the way the world runs. If the schedule were to shift from that, parents may be inconvenienced since they would have to schedule childcare and figure out how to take care of their children in those breaks. In addition, teens usually get internships or jobs during these breaks, and would lose that experience from their lives or have to work it into already busy school schedules. 

But schools can help with that by offering daycare and enrichment opportunities during the breaks, while other people who need to can still use those traditional methods. Overall, there needs to be more research on school breaks because so little is still known about just how much this would help us and whether it would be a valuable change to our society.