Everyone into the School!

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Summertime, and most American schoolchildren are taking it easy: hitting the beach, going to summer camp or just sitting around the house bored out of their skull. But for kids like Amy Simon, 9, of Mooresville, North Carolina, a new school year is just beginning. Last week Amy was in her air-conditioned fourth-grade science class at Park View Elementary, mixing together polyvinyl and Borax to make red, green and yellow slime. "If you have the whole summer off, you get bored," she says. Instead of a long summer vacation, Amy now goes to school year-round, with shorter but more frequent break periods. "Just when I get tired of school, it's time for a break," says Amy. Her next respite will be a three-week vacation in September, when most kids her age are trudging back to class.

The reason for the seemingly topsy-turvy schedule is that Park View is one of 1,905 schools in the U.S. that are in session year-round. Praised by educators and parents as a way for students to learn better and schools to operate more efficiently, year-round schooling is steadily catching on. As of June 30, 1.4 million students were enrolled in year-round schools, from rural North Carolina to inner-city Detroit -- an increase from 429,000 five years ago. The largest number are in California; 42% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state's largest, are enrolled in year- round programs. The apparent success of such schooling has inspired hundreds of districts across the country to study the concept; if current trends continue, National Association for Year-Round Education officials say, the number will more than double by the end of the decade.

"The traditional school calendar was set when children had to help out in the fields and most mothers didn't work outside the home," says Mooresville program supervisor Carol Carroll, who has seen Park View grow from 202 children in 1990 to 1,101 children, representing 49% of the town's grade- school population. "Families today have a completely different life-style. This is a program that works for how we live today."

It may also be the answer to the decades-old concern that American students are being ill-prepared by their educational system to compete with their counterparts overseas. A federal commission fueled such fears when it reported in May that American students spend less than half the time studying the core subjects of math, reading, history and science that students in such countries as Germany, France and Japan do. Education critics have long called for extending the U.S. school year from its current 180 days to something closer to Japan's 240 days.

A few schools have attempted to do just that. Beacon Day School, for example, a private school in Oakland, California, operates 240 days a year, with vacations scheduled at parents' leisure. More commonly, however, schools have simply reorganized the traditional 180-day schedule. At Park View, classes run for nine weeks, followed by a three-week break, a schedule known as a 45/15 calendar. Other schools, such as those in the Socorro Independent School District in El Paso County, Texas, use a 60/20 model: 60 days of school followed by 20 days of vacation.