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| (Peter Muhly) |
| School districts in many states have cut the summer short to give students more time to study for state tests. Tommy Huynh arrived at school in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Friday. |
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Aug. 16 — More than a dozen school districts in Florida — and others in Texas, Maryland, Kentucky, Colorado and California — have moved up the opening day of school this year, cutting short summer vacations and requiring students to report a week or more earlier than in recent years.
The reason, in many instances, is to give students an earlier start on preparing for state standardized tests, which are usually given in late winter or early spring.
While the tests are not necessarily new, schools face stiff federal sanctions, including the loss of some federal money, this year under the new Bush education law if they fail to meet specified goals for progress on those tests.
In Florida, the state has added a stick: third graders who fail a state reading test in the spring will not be promoted.
Many of the students starting school early will be ending earlier next year as well, some as early as mid-May. For financial reasons, the districts have not added substantially to the standard school year, which is about 180 days. Schools in at least half the districts in Florida opened in the first 10 days of August.
The new schedules have caught some students off guard. On the first Tuesday evening in August, for example, Eric DeBoe, 8, announced to his family that he would be spending the next day with his friend Tyler, rehearsing scenes in the Jackie Chan-style action movie they are writing.
Eric's aunt, with whom he lives here in this seaside city, gently reminded him that his plans would have to be postponed until the weekend: He was to start the third grade at Clearview Elementary School that very morning, Aug. 7.
"I thought it was going to be a longer summer," Eric remembered saying.
Last year on this date, opening day at Clearview was still six days away. But today, Eric had his eighth day of class, along with the 112,000 other students in the Pinellas County Public School District, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater. By the day after Labor Day, they will have been in school nearly four weeks.
"For some children, the extra time could make a difference," said Georgia Painter, a third-grade teacher who has been teaching at Clearview for 32 years, but never this early in August. "You just have to adjust your own personal schedule accordingly."
Experts on educational scheduling who have long pushed for the reduction of the 10-week summer break — a vestige of when planting and harvesting schedules influenced the academic calendar — say that the increasing acceptance of August as back-to-school month is an important psychological shift for some children, parents and teachers.
"Breaking from the traditional schedule does open up lots of possibilities, one of which might be longer school years or different kinds of schedules in schools," said Michael D. Rettig, a professor of education at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.
Another reason, in addition to testing, that districts are beginning the year earlier is to accommodate so-called block schedules, in which a high school student might take a year's worth of chemistry in the first semester and a year's worth of history in the same slot in the second semester.
To complete the first semester before Christmas, the school year must often begin several weeks before Labor Day.
In Colorado Springs, for example, school will begin on Tuesday this year, compared with Sept. 2 five years ago, so high school students will not have to spend their winter breaks studying for first-semester exams.
Others schools around the country — about 3,000, compared with half as many a decade ago — are now operating on so-called year-round calendars, in which the summer vacation is shortened and vacations during the year are lengthened (often to three weeks) and staggered.
Some schools have adopted such schedules to thin the populations of crowded schools, allowing some students to be on vacation while others are in class. Other schools have done so to give struggling students extra time to catch up in specially scheduled remedial sessions.
While many states defer to individual districts to decide when they wish to begin the year, Texas passed a law last year that set the week of Aug. 21 as the earliest a district could open. Since then, 90 districts — about 1 in 10 statewide — have received permission from the state to open earlier, often by a week or more, to get a jump on the year's curriculum.
Here in Pinellas County, concerns about standardized testing and finishing the first semester before winter break prompted officials to announce two years ago that school would open this year on Aug. 7, 15 days earlier than in 2001. But the advance notice did not necessarily smooth the transition for parents and teachers at Clearview Elementary, a cluster of brick- and stucco-covered buildings connected in parts by quaint boardwalks.
On the first day of school, when district officials had projected that 700 students would show up, only 600 did, said Denise Miller, the school's longtime principal. The second day, the number was 618.
Concerned, school officials made posters with a stern headline — "Attention Clearview Elementary Families SCHOOL HAS STARTED!" — and plastered them around the neighborhood, including at the Family Dollar and
That Ms. Musco's efforts had paid off was evident this morning, when 658 children were present.
For Ms. Musco, adapting to a seven-week vacation this summer — an eternity to someone who does not work in a school system but an alarmingly short period of time to someone who has for eight years — proved a personal challenge.
"If you're a family that tries to go on a couple of vacations and plans a lot of events, you have very little relaxation time," said Ms. Musco, a mother of two girls, ages 5 and 2. "You're trying to squeeze so much in."
The school's physical education teacher, Carmen Needham, also had to make modifications. While the school's classrooms are air-conditioned, there is no gym.
As a result, at 9 a.m. today, when the temperature outside was already 84 degrees, Ms. Needham scrapped plans to run 31 third graders through a game of tag and instead staged a more sedentary drill, in which the children were grouped in pairs and instructed to close their eyes, turn in circles and then try to locate one another.
By the time Ms. Needham first blew her whistle and uttered an ordinarily soothing word — "Freeze!" — many of the children were already overheated.
Perhaps the most surprising observation after spending an August day at Clearview Elementary was how few of the children complained about their truncated summer. Most said they had grown bored at home after seven weeks and welcomed the structure that had been restored to their lives.
As she arrived 20 minutes early for school today, Cathy Kline, 9, was asked to explain the broad smile across her face. "My mom gave me a new backpack," she said, "and I couldn't wait to use it."
