The All-Year Year

How about spending the long, hot summer in school? Few American schoolchildren would be expected to stay away voluntarily from the softball lot, the beach, the fishing hole. Yet, in Atlanta, where few schools are air-conditioned, almost one-third of 38,000 eligible high school pupils have volunteered this year to stick to their books through the sweltering heat of July and August.

The students are taking advantage of Atlanta's new four-quarter plan for year-round schooling, the first to be adopted by an American city since the 1930s. The flexible scheme will allow them to choose any quarter they like for their vacation, or to attend all year without interruption. High-schoolers in a hurry can compress five years of studies into 45 months by taking extra quarters. Slow learners can use summer lessons to make up failed courses, take their time mastering subjects difficult for them, without dropping a year behind their class. Scholars interested in improving their prospects for entering college can broaden and deepen their education by taking extra courses.

Help for Dropouts. The system is so flexible that needy students can hold part-time jobs all year, attend school part time and still meet graduation requirements. The curriculum developed for the four-quarter plan offers 710 courses, most of which can be taken out of any established sequence. Students now can choose among 48 English courses of one-quarter length, where before there were only five year-long courses.

For the teachers, the new system means that they can earn higher pay if they choose to work the full year, or work only the required three quarters at their regular salaries. To date, so many have chosen to work all year at extra pay that there has been no need to hire additional staffers. Teacher Jeanine Lewis of Grady High School says the new courses "keep me from being stalemated, and they add spice for the students, too." Mrs. Lewis believes the new system will also help dropouts ease back into school during the more casual summer quarter, when teachers can take more time to work with them.

Atlanta has requested but not received state funds for its four-quarter project. As a result, it is paying more than $1,000,000 beyond its regular $71 million school budget for the summer quarter. School officials maintain nonetheless that the city's fast-growing industries--and thus the city itself--will benefit financially when vacations are spread more evenly over the entire year. Until this year, most working parents took vacations in the summer, when their children were out of school, resulting in summertime business slowdowns and production losses. Another advantage of the summer quarter lies in providing useful activity for poor children who have no other resort in summer than the streets. Superintendent of Schools John W. Letson points out that the old school-year structure was developed in a rural past. In an urban society, he says, "it does not seem like good planning to turn all the children loose at the same time."

Seven-Ton Solution. Atlanta's plan was painstakingly evolved over a three-year period by teachers, principals and administrators. When the principals' committee met for six weeks last summer to develop the complex new schedules and curriculum guide, it used up more than seven tons of paper. So many factors were involved in scheduling new classes and redistributing teaching and classroom assignments that the Atlanta School System had to develop its own computer program. Says John Martin, a former assistant superintendent who directed the curriculum changeover: "The computer is as essential to our system as it was for the moon shot."

More than 250 other school districts have recently considered year-round classes. Atlanta has had inquiries from 37 states and 89 cities about its plan. New York State's education department last year recommended an eleven-month school calendar, is now drafting implementing legislation.

A compulsory year-round system has actually been tested in schools in other cities, usually as a cost-cutting expedient; it is obviously wasteful to keep costly educational facilities idle for a quarter of each year. Moreover, if a school system operates twelve months instead of nine, it can provide nine months of education per year for one-third again as many students. But pilot studies have demonstrated no appreciable economies and have shown that there is opposition to compulsory attendance during the summer quarter. Atlanta, by encouraging voluntary summer participation to broaden the learning process rather than merely to increase efficiency, may have found a way to do both.

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