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5.3.3 Coordinated Scheduling
School schedules and
parent schedules are not coordinated. If you stop to think about it, when
we have a workforce where more than half of the mothers are out working
or in school, wouldn't it be nice if the school schedule and the parents
schedules were coordinated? That seems pretty obvious to me. The school
schedule goes back to agrarian times where you have the summer off so
that you can go participate in the harvest and you get out at 3 o'clock
in the afternoon so you can go home and do the chores before the sun goes
down. That's where the school schedule came
from but that's not the world we live in now. The schedule has become
such a traditional part of our way of doing things that we've come to
accept it even though its silly. We accept it so much that to challenge
the current schedule to make it sensible is viewed as anti-American. The
idea of having school start at 7:30 in the morning and go until 6 at night,
which would really be the schedule that would suit the society, that is
viewed as big time trouble. Let me be clear that the school could go from
7:30 in the morning until 6 at night but that wouldn't necessarily mean
that the teachers all have to be there for that whole time. I think it
would be nice, for example, if you had a schedule where some teachers
would come in early and some would come in late. I know a lot of teachers
who wouldn't mind working until 6 at night if they didn't have to come
in until 10 in the morning. Some people are morning people and some are
evening people, we're just different that way. Kids are different too
as a matter of fact. But it doesn't mean that if school were from 7:30
in the morning until 6 at night or even ten at night, because I think
that the school as a resource should be open to kids in the community
until ten at night, and there's no reason it shouldn't be, doesn't mean
that you have to be there all the time and it also doesn't mean that you
have to be in class all the time.
At Azalea Gardens, they have a very innovative Saturday program where, if kids go to school 3 hours Saturday morning, then they can stay and use the school's recreation facilities for the next three hours and the school will give them refreshments and I think they even feed them lunch. For kids, to have something fun to do on a Saturday is a good trade off for spending a couple of hours in school in the morning. I think there are lots of ways that we could sharpen up the schedule to go way beyond what we are now doing. But again, it would take different kinds of resources and certainly a different kind of conceptualization. The issue also comes up of year round schooling. There's no reason why kids should go to school for nine months out of the year and then be home for three months. That's not a very good learning schedule. For people to take three months to forget so that you have to spend a lot of time reviewing to bring them back up to speed. Part of the problem, of course, is, if you have year round schooling, this has reverberations all the way through society.
Two of my grand daughters
are on year round schooling right now in Colorado, but that's only for
elementary school. When they go to high school they will be on a traditional
schedule. Can anybody guess why? So they can work during the summer. Exactly
right. Colorado is a big time leisure industry in the summer time and
all of those summer resorts
need the slave labor of kids during the summer and the kids need the work.
The kids feel penalized if they don't get their summers off to work in
the resorts. Of course, if we did it right, if we had year round schools,
we could learn something from South Africa. Before independence South
Africa had four provinces. I don't know what their current schedule is
because they now have nine provinces. One of the things that they did
was rotate their vacations so that each province went on vacation at a
slightly different time. They did that because of limited facilities at
the vacation destinations. So instead of having the whole country having
a spring vacation at the same time, they spread it over a four week period
in the provinces. Our resort industries could win if we had some version
of that so that different schools or states could have their vacations
at different times to get an even use of facilities rather than a huge
influx
of people at the same time and a huge letdown on Labor Day.
This summer I went to California and the Grand Canyon and the schools there start the week before Labor Day. So the resorts were dead when we were there which was very nice. Not even a very sensible use of society's resources in our national parks in other areas. We do a lot of things insensibly. But the bottom line for our purposes today is that it's not ideal for school schedules and parents' schedules to be uncoordinated. We could have a lot of discussion in terms of the best way of coordinating or the kind of coordination that would be desirable.
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