Working Group on Alternative Calendars, Report to the Legislature

Abstract

In the last decade, the number of schools with year-round calendars has increased five-fold. Currently, over 2 million students are enrolled in the more than 2,900 year-round programs in the United States. Interest in alternative school calendars continues to grow as more and more school districts explore ways to manage rapidly increasing enrollments and improve student achievement.

In October 1998, a Working Group was convened to provide independent advice to the State Legislature on alternatives to the traditional nine-month, September through June school year calendar. The Department of Children, Families and Learning secured the services of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota to provide facilitation for the sessions, conduct relevant research, and prepare the final report.

Although the charge of the Working Group was to examine issues regarding the reallocation of the existing instructional time through changes in the school calendar, the related issue of extending or adding time continued to surface in the broader context of how schools can best utilize instructional time to ensure that all students are well served. While recognizing that the issues of reorganizing and increasing instructional time are closely related and often occur simultaneously, the group agreed to remain focused on programs that restructure existing time by altering the school calendar and, of those, the one most commonly implemented: the year-round school calendar.