Why are millions of students returning to school early?

Melodie Wright’s children were among the first in the country to return to school. Her son started 10th grade and her daughter started second grade in Birmingham, Alabama, the first full week of August, more than six weeks before the official end of summer.

Millions of students across the country, including in Alabama, are packing up their backpacks, meeting with teachers and classmates and adjusting to classroom procedures since school started. Elsewhere in the U.S., children are flocking to beaches on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts as scorching temperatures hit some areas, including Death Valley and Puerto Rico.

Wright feels it’s too early to start the school year. She wishes she had more time to spend with the kids. She would gladly wait until after Labor Day, when schools in other parts of the country begin their school years.

Keary Noy, another Alabama mother, sees it differently. For her, the sooner classes start, the better. The charter school Noy’s son attends pushed back the start date to early August, but she would have preferred a July start.

Of course, the first day of school isn’t uniform across the country. Data shows that start dates generally correlate with norms where you live.

Students in Southern states are more likely to start school in early August, according to an analysis of 2023 school calendars by the Pew Research Center. The researchers based their findings on 1,573 public school district calendars from the 2023-24 school year.

Children in school districts in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania tend to have the latest return-to-school days, Pew analysis shows.

Pew found that the most common start dates for districts are during the second and third full weeks of August.

Most schools around Regana Bracey in New Jersey will reopen after Labor Day.

Bracey, who belongs to a parent group working on education reform, recalls being surprised by the big difference in start dates, since as a child she would visit her family in the South in late summer and her cousins would already be back in school.

“My cousins would leave school in May and always have their summer holidays earlier. And I was jealous of that. But on the other hand, they went back to school earlier,” she said.

Decades later, the variety in the months people consider “summer vacation” seems normal.

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Why do some schools return sooner than others?

Most states require schools to offer about 180 days of instruction with some exceptions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

There is less uniformity across the country when it comes to calendar start dates, however. At least 15 states have laws specifying when public school calendars must begin or end. At least 27 other states allow districts to determine when to return from summer break, according to a 2023 Education Commission of the States report comparing calendar year policies across the country.

The requirement that children return to school for part of the summer arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in a shift from one-room schools to divided-age classrooms, when schools began to see lower attendance in urban schools during the summer months, according to the Pew Research Center.

In the past, school calendars were adapted to agricultural patterns or were open all year round.

“In fact, until the early 20th century, rural schools typically operated in the summer and winter, and children worked on farms in the spring and fall to help with planting and harvesting,” the Pew article explains. “Urban schools, in contrast, were open nearly year-round, although many children attended sporadically or only for part of the year.”

Schools are testing later start times in some parts of the US.

Another consideration in some areas is keeping children cool in the summer. This is a challenge for schools as regions adjust to higher temperatures at the start of the school year. Some buildings do not have adequate air conditioning to keep children cool enough to learn.

In response to a parent survey, the School District of Philadelphia adjusted its calendar a year ago to begin after Labor Day during the 2023-2024 school year, making it later than the 2022-23 school year.

But even with the delayed start, Philadelphia schools sent kids home early at the start of last school year because of high temperatures.

Other areas will see later start dates this year, including Milwaukee Public Schools, which begins Sept. 3. Some schools in the district previously followed an early start schedule in mid-August, but the district was forced to cancel classes due to heat in the first few days of the school year.

Contributor: Rory Linnane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

Why do some schools return sooner than others?

Schools are testing later start times in some parts of the US.

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