It’s The First Day Of School At Year-Round Elementary School In La Crosse

Thursday marks the first day of the new school year at Hamilton Elementary school in La Crosse — a school that, along with a handful of other districts in the state, operates on a year-round academic calendar.

Year-round schools are modeled so that instead of long summer breaks, students have shorter breaks over the course of the calendar year.

Steve Michaels, principal at Hamilton, said the school operates on a schedule called “45-15.”

“The days of the year are distributed more evenly over the course of the calendar,” said Michaels. “So under the 180-day school year, the quarters are roughly 45 days long, of course, and so that’s where the 45 comes in, with 15 days off in between them.”

The year-round calendar is an effort to help combat the “summer slide,” the learning loss that children experience when they aren’t participating in educational activities in the summer.

Michaels said that before switching to a year-round schedule, they had a lot of kids losing ground over the course of the summer, “causing us to spend most of our first quarter re-teaching, (and) setting kids farther and farther behind the instructional plan.”

Since then, said Michaels, there has been a marked improvement.

“This past summer we noticed that our levels of regression dropped to the single digits of students, and it’s allowed our staff to begin teaching new content as early as the third day of school,” said Michaels.

Nationally the year-round format is gaining some momentum according to a recent congressional research report. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee has 13 year-round schools, with others in Racine and LaCrosse.