Vertigo and generalized confusion. If you’ve never seen a year-round school calendar, prepare for the same side effects you might experience from staring at a solar eclipse or exposure to strobe lights. If you don’t develop a permanent blind spot from the tight configuration of competing primary colors, you might have an epileptic seizure trying to figure out when your kid’s breaks will be. At first glance, it’s some next-level complicated shit.
Basic understanding. It may take a life coach, a tutor, and a hypnotist, but ultimately, you’ll grasp the general idea. The year-round school year consists of nine-weeks on, three weeks off, nine-weeks on, etc, with a rotating free-for-all of breaks that fall once every season depending on what “track” you’re assigned to. Everyone gets a long Thanksgiving weekend, a full week off for Christmas, and major one-off holidays, like MLK and Good Friday, sprinkled in between. The school year “ends” for everyone on the last Friday in June, then the whole damn district gets the week of July 4th off. The next time your kid “tracks” back in, the new school year begins.
Cautious optimism. “Tracking in and out” is a delicate system of moving parts with each track functioning not unlike the alternate ending of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story from back in the day. Except you don’t so much “choose” your track as you are assigned to one based on a convoluted system of weights and balances designed to confuse you into submission. Once you grasp the calendar basics, one or two tracks start sounding good to you. The others seem like total anarchy and upheaval. At registration, you’ll be asked to rank your track preferences from most to least desirable. You pick a favorite and hope for the best.
False confidence. On registration day, you go all in for Track 4 as your first choice because it won’t fuck with your family’s existing summer vacation and because school will “start back” in August as the good Lord intended, right about the time it’s too fucking hot to stand outdoor activities any longer. Little do you know, half the town ascribes to the same strategy and you have a donut’s chance in the teachers’ lounge of getting what you want. In other words, you’re gonna wish you'd put some thought into those 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choices.
Shocking disappointment. Your track assignment arrives and what the fucking fuck. You got nothing close to what you wanted. You now have two options: Refusal or Acceptance.
Refusal. This is where you rage against the machine by applying to a magnet school, a charter school, a private school, or the traditional calendar option for your current address (cuz there is one). Maybe you decide to home-school or travel back in time to enlist your child as the apprentice to a fucking blacksmith. Either way, it’s totally your choice. Bucking the system requires a snug-fitting pair of “patient pants” in order to accommodate the moderate-to-severe pain in the ass it can be, but it’s always an option. If you choose it, this is where your year-round adventure ends.
Acceptance. You decide to go with the fucking flow and hope to be pleasantly surprised. After all, every track offers its own unique window for fun off-season vacations. Tracks 2 and 3? Take that fabulous Disney adventure in early February! Tracks 3 and 4? Go to the mountains in October! Track 1? Go to the beach in September when it’s still hot as fuck but the rates are low! Sure, your kids will sweat to death in June and July when the school’s air-conditioning inevitably dies... and they might not be allowed out to recess for two months in order to avoid being permanently branded by scalding-hot playground equipment exposed to the blazing summer sun. But just consider it a small price to pay for the off-season envy of your traditional calendar friends!
Perpetual planning for intermittent upheaval. Maybe you work full-time and have minimal flexibility. Maybe your high schooler is on a traditional calendar but your middle schooler goes year-round. Maybe your child’s schedule of before-care, after-care, and transportation is already more complicated than whatever algorithm they used to draft the year-round calendar. If so, you’ll be in a constant state of planning for the next track-out, wondering, “Holy hell. Didn’t I just do this?” Even if you stay home with younger kids full-time, you may still find yourself blindsided by impending track-out, whisper-yelling, “FUCK” to yourself when you realize next week’s trip to the grocery store will have to include your entire unwilling entourage.
Make-up days on Saturday. While traditional calendar schools reserve the option to renege on President’s Day or some random teacher workday when acts of nature strike, no such leeway exists in the year-round calendar. In the event that school closes unexpectedly, due to ice, snow, hurricane, earthquake, or space invasion, year-round kids make it up on Saturdays. Can that be a bitch sometimes? Sure. Is it kind of a blessing sometimes? YES.
Nine weeks “on” is plenty. Sometimes, the breaks do feel constant, but other stretches are long and arduous, where you feel the end of the quarter ominously approaching like a shit-storm in the distance. If your kids need to be peeled off the ceiling due to pent up energy but also act like abused children when you ask them to expend mundane amounts of effort for tasks like putting on shoes, it’s time for track out. If they’re full of unbridled rage one minute and sobbing like you murdered their puppy the next, it’s time for track-out. How do kids on a traditional schedule handle that unbroken stretch of school from August to Thanksgiving? No clue. Your kids are dead behind the eyes by Week 5.
Three weeks “off” is plenty. The average track-out period is just long enough for the excitement of upheaval to get old for everyone involved. Maybe you took a cool vacation, sent your kid to a fun camp, or let them enjoy some downtime digging holes in the yard, building forts in the bonus room, binge-watching Ninjago in their pajamas, or playing video games until the controller was semi-permanently grafted to their palms. No matter what wonders you set forth (or didn’t) for your kid, the expiration date on “fun” turns out to be roughly 3 weeks from the day track-out starts. By then, all joy and novelty are gone and the familiar pitfalls of free-time, like boredom, laziness, ungratefulness, and irritability, begin to seep in once again. When you realize your 7-year-old’s handwriting has gone from “legible” to looking like he may have had a stroke at some point in the last week, you’re grateful the break isn’t longer. And when your kids wake up fighting over the same fucking couch cushion every day, you’ll be thanking your lucky fucking stars that you don’t have a full summer’s worth of this bullshit to deal with. You take the good with the bad, of course, but it's times like these when year-round school seems pretty fucking great.
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