Two North Kansas City elementary schools ring in the first day on a year-round schedule

With one little finger in the air, 7-year-old Ivan Ramirez announced his grade level.

“First grade.”

No, no, no. His mother, Claudia Ramirez, shook her head.

It seems the North Kansas City School District’s unusual experiment to open a pair of year-round elementary schools Wednesday had thrown off a lot of clocks. It’s mid-June, after all.

“Second grade!” Ivan said in a sheepish correction.

And the second grade starts now for Ivan. He and more than 750 other elementary children in the Winnwood and Crestview schools showed up with their parents in shorts and dresses to start a school year that will run through summer and then continue alongside all the other schools’ regular school calendar until May 2016.

In all, with a few two-week vacation breaks tossed in, the children in the year-round schools will get 31 more days of instruction — totaling 208.

It doesn’t come easily. Or cheaply. There are many reasons why few places in the U.S. extend their school years — even though many other nations do it, and even though the summer break is well-documented for draining away much of the previous year’s learning gains.

“I know a lot of people think they should be swimming, or going to the park,” said Ivan’s second grade teacher, Maggie Hovey. “But we’re going to do fun things this year. And they can still do those things, too.”

The extra days of learning, Hovey said, “are a gift,” a “treasure.”

It’s coming at an estimated cost of $575,000 in salaries and services, said North Kansas City’s chief financial officer, Paul Harrell.

Cost is one reason schools struggle to add more school days.

Other reasons come wrapped in American traditions, summer expectations and the well-being of camp and tourism industries that rely on an expansive summer break.

North Kansas City is working its way mostly around those obstacles.

The district will designate the extra days as summer school for accounting purposes in order to draw on the per-pupil funding the state makes available for summer school. It expects to cover some 70 percent of its costs that way.

Summer programming for the state funding has to be voluntary, however. The district is making it voluntary by allowing families that can’t or won’t do year-round school to accept district transportation to other district schools for the conventional school year beginning in August.

The district also gave teachers the option to transfer to other schools.

Most of the families wanted in. Some 90 percent of Winnwood’s and more than 95 percent of Crestview’s children from a year ago enrolled, the principals said.

What they began Wednesday is not what families would expect of a typical summer school.

They started with a curriculum, jointly recrafted by teachers from both schools, to give opportunities to take their lessons deeper throughout the school year.

These are full days. Real school.

That will give the school more opportunities in the longer school year for interdisciplinary exercises blending math and science, said Rochel Daniels, the district’s director of curriculum and professional development. There will be more opportunities for creative problem-solving.

“This is not summer camp.”

Rare experiment

The sortable database at the National Center on Time and Learning tracks the still-slugglish rise in extended school hours.

Most schools that try to increase classroom time do it by lengthening the school day. Most of the year-round schools — which want to reduce the summer learning loss — don’t add total days, but spread around breaks in the schedule throughout the year.

The number of public schools on its nationwide list through 2013 that have extended their school year beyond 190 days numbered 107 out of roughly 98,000.

Most of the year-round schools — more than 80 percent — listed themselves as urban. More than 70 percent were charter schools, publicly funded schools that operate independently with their own school boards.

“There is not a massive public clamoring” for year-round schools, said Otto Fajen, the legislative director of the Missouri National Education Association teachers union. “A lot of people like their summers off. A lot of teachers like their summers off.”

But the potential educational benefits make sense, he said. And when families and teachers can choose whether to join year-round schooling, Fajen said, “it can make a huge difference.”

North Kansas City intends to find out if its investment justifies the costs, said Dan Clemens, the assistant superintendent for administrative services.

The district has enlisted the Kansas City Area Education Research Consortium to analyze multiple potential impacts and return independent research.

Test performance will be an important measure, but the consortium’s work will look much further than that, said Jacob Fowles, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas’ School of Public Affairs and Administration.

The researchers will look for economic benefits. Families could save on day care costs, he said. Some children will get healthier meals and they could gain safety benefits being in school during the summer. The change could also yield new community attitudes toward learning.

“We’re invited to cast our net more broadly,” he said.

To date, research on extended school years has been “mixed,” Fowles said. But studies on the impact of more school time are inherently difficult because of so many intervening factors in a child’s progress, he said.

David Hornak, executive director of the National Association for Year-Round Education, expects that North Kansas City’s efforts, if done well, will help the students and their families.

Most of the extended school year programs around the nation have started in schools that serve high concentrations of poorer families.

Those schools try to close the learning gaps that open over time for children whose families don’t have the same opportunities to send them to the educational summer camps, or go on the culturally rich vacations or tour museums.

The schools are counteracting “the faucet theory,” Hornak said, that says the flow of educational opportunity shuts off for too many children come summer.

North Kansas City chose Winnwood and Crestview for year-round school partly because some 80 percent of their children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

“Our kids are not in camps all summer or on European excursions,” Winnwood Principal Leah Copeland said.

The school and its staff take great pride in going year-round, she said. And the families out front waiting for the opening the first morning reflected the enthusiasm.

“Everyone’s gung ho,” Copeland said. “It’s groundbreaking. … It sets us apart.”

Year-round challenges

The families have to make adjustments. The schools have many problems to solve.

The usual remodeling and repairing of the old buildings had to be done in two weeks. The schools had to ramp up neighborhood communication, reaching out through neighborhood associations, apartment managers and real estate agents to get out the word to new arrivals that their local school was starting June 10.

All systems have to work — including special education programming, gifted classes and the nutritional BackSnack program.

Extending the school year, Crestview Principal Deyrle Wallace said, means “extending every service.”

Some families could not make the switch. Some children spend their summers with relatives in other states or even other countries.

One of Claudia Ramirez’s friends sends a daughter to Poland with grandparents, she said, and the girl cried over having to switch schools.

Crestview parent Leilani Boyd chose to enroll her two children in the year-round school, although it will conflict with some of the scout camps and sports camps they enjoy.

“It’s really hard with the camps,” she said. But the family can schedule some around the breaks in early July and mid-August, and there is also plenty of time in there to plan a vacation, she said.

In the end, she said, it was not a difficult decision. She’s happy to navigate the inconveniences to get more schooling. Her kids are ready to go.

“I think it’s going to help them,” she said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

This story was originally published June 10, 2015 at 9:42 PM with the headline "Two North Kansas City elementary schools ring in the first day on a year-round schedule."