Burdened with tight budgets and concerned about student achievement, school districts in B.C. are toying with the idea of modifying their school calendars. But whether they shorten just the summer or the school week itself, educators and public employees don't agree on who is being served better: students or district budgets.

Both the Vancouver and the Nanaimo-Ladysmith school boards have announced their interest in a balanced or modified school year, where instead of a two-month summer vacation and shorter breaks for Christmas and the spring, balanced calendars spread breaks throughout the year.

It's a concept already in use for 14 years by Kanaka Creek Elementary, a K-7 school in the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows district, where students attend school for three months, have a month off, return to school for three months, and so on. Principal Katie Sullivan admits there is little concrete evidence to support the educational benefits at Kanaka, but she believes they exist.

"I can tell you that the anecdotal evidence around the atmosphere in the school and the engagement in the school, people feel very strongly that it's very positive," Sullivan told The Tyee.

"Students, teachers, and parents all say at the end of three months you're tired, you go on a month break, it's a good solid break, you come back rested, rejuvenated and ready to go."

Preventing 'summer learning loss'

Carolyn M. Shields, professor of educational organization and leadership at the University of Illinois, has studied year-round schooling in the U.S. and Canada for 10 years, concluding it is the best method for preventing "summer learning loss" for at-risk pupils.

"There's huge research that's consistent for about 40 years that talks about how kids from disadvantaged or less advantaged families learn about the same amount during the school year, but in the summer when their advantaged peers travel with their families, enroll in activities, go to camp, they're left on the streets or home watching television," Shields told The Tyee, citing a study she co-wrote showing Grade 3 students in seven Ontario schools with balanced calendars did marginally better in reading, but significantly better in math, than their peers in traditional calendar schools.

"It helps to equalize the learning of kids from socio-economically poor families. It also provides an opportunity if kids are early English language learners for teachers to work with them during the breaks to help them know the vocabulary so they can stay caught up."

Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers Federation (BCTF), doesn't believe there is substantial enough evidence to argue the educational benefits, however. She also takes issue with the encroachment on traditional vacations, arguing many families use them to reconnect with one another.

"What happens is if one child is in one school and another is in another and they don't have aligned days off, then that's really interfering with the time that I think is very precious, family time," she told The Tyee.

Sullivan admits that's the most common gripe she hears from parents, however she says it does little to dampen the support for Kanaka's calendar.

"We maybe lose one, maybe two [families] a year when the older child goes to high school and we say we can't have two different calendars. Very few parents move because of that. So it kind of says something there," she says.

Going to four-day weeks

Balanced calendars don't often save money as schools are open the same number of days, and may cost extra if schools require upgrades such as air conditioning for the warmer months, or for employing teachers during intersession.

However, since the provincial School Act requires a certain number of instructional hours, not days, in the year, some boards have cut the week to four longer days to save money. It's a budget first, education second approach the BCTF does not approve of.

"Not only does it not benefit students, we believe it is detrimental to learning. Some young children, it makes for a very long day. And then there's a long break in between, so there's a three-day break in-between learning," Lambert told The Tyee.

The Boundary school district has had a four-day school week for eight years now, where elementary students can be in school from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., sometimes longer to match secondary bus schedules. Superintendent Michael Strukoff admits the board made the decision under budget pressures and a declining enrollment to avoid closing schools. However, he says students have not been negatively affected by the change.

"The four-day week is not a factor in terms of any ups and downs. We've been doing it for a long time, so we've seen the trend lines and we've seen improvements in schools during the four-day week, and we've seen some schools having difficulties and then improvements," he told The Tyee, adding the district saves two to three per cent of its annual budget by cutting one day a week.

"It's a four-day week district for the indeterminate future."

The Gulf Islands district made the switch to a four-day week six years ago, saving at least $400,000 that first year, now closer to $500,000 annually. But although the district admits the impetus behind the move was balancing the budget, superintendent Jeff Hopkins says there have been unexpected benefits to shortening the week.

"We've seen our provincial exam scores for our graduate level go up consistently since the change; we've seen our absenteeism go down significantly since the change; we've seen our kids doing better at our Grade 10 exams as well," says Hopkins, adding the provincial exams were introduced only two years before the change.

Other benefits have included less time spent in transit. Comprising five islands, the Gulf Island district uses ferries to transport children in what Hopkins describes as "grueling" daily commutes, now made only four times a week. On Fridays when the schools are closed, community organizations step in to provide activities for kids, keeping them busy and away from the TV.

The story is different, though, for Coast Mountains school district, where administrators say that after trying the four-day week approach for six years, they decided it was better for students as well as staff to go back to five-day weeks (see sidebar).

Money saved is pay days lost

Unlike teachers and administrators who are paid an annual salary, school support staff such as educational assistants, secretaries, and custodians are paid by the hour, often only when school is in session. With the loss of one school day comes a loss of pay, affecting each staff member differently.

"We've had experience around the province with calendar changes that have just been kind of rammed through because it is seen to make budgetary sense," says John Malcolmson, research representative for CUPE BC.

"Even if they do ask for support staff input -- sometimes it's just ignored -- decisions are made to go in that direction and effectively to put an extra burden on support staff who are typically the lowest paid people within the district."

CUPE employees in the Gulf Islands district have adjusted, according to Hopkins: originally met with anger, they have warmed to the change.

"I would have to say that the consensus would be that if we were to say we were going to change back, I think people would be quite upset," he says. "The people have kind of got their lives sorted out and when we're offering extra work for a special occasion, people aren't sort of snapping up the chance to take extra work, they've figured out a good work-life balance."

Malcolmson says some workers adjust, but it doesn't change the bottom line of their argument, which also takes issue with the idea of year-round schooling. Despite the academic work put forth by Shields, CUPE BC agrees with the BCTF that there is not enough information on the educational affects of a balanced school year.

"What is known is that changes in calendar that disrupt the continuity of school life tend to impact students differently. Those students whose connection to the school is more tenuous or had difficulty staying afloat in their different course obligations, those kids tend to get more disproportionately affected by changes in calendar or school organization," Malcolmson told The Tyee.

But if Strukoff had his way, Boundary would have a four-day school week and a balanced calendar. Serving forestry-based communities, the region has an average income $15,000 to $17,000 less than the provincial average, leaving many students close to or below the poverty line and therefore at-risk.

"[It] would probably be the best scenario, we would think, educationally, for our kids. If that was a possibility," Strukoff told The Tyee.

"We know we have other districts that have tried to talk about a four-day week, and they've had a lot of resistance from parents. The irony is when you think about the parent community, you think about the kind of hours many of them work: how many of them work the traditional Monday through Friday hours? They're on shifts, they're four on, four off; they're part-time; they work at home.

"It's a real big mix, and that's one of the things that we have found with our communities is we actually started looking at it. So I think it's a cultural thing right now."