WHAT DOES A YEAR-ROUND SCHOOL LOOK LIKE?
In most instances, year-round schools operate on calendars that are reworkings of a traditional, nine-month calendar. Year-round students attend the same number of days as their counterparts (180), except that these days are arranged differently. The most popular YRE calendar is the 45-15 plan, where students attend school for 45 days and then go on vacation for 15. There are numerous other types of schedules as well, but the common factor in all YRE calendars is that students have several short vacations all through the year, rather than one three-month summer break (Ballinger and others 1987). A few year-round schools have all their students on the same instructional and vacation schedule (a singletrack calendar). Most, however, operate on a multitrack calendar, which groups students onto tracks that have different instructional and vacation schedules. These tracks are stepped so that there is always at least one track on vacation (Ballinger and others). The multitrack calendar allow
