End-Your-Summer-Inator

“There’s 104 days of summer vacation,
’Til school comes along just to end it.”

“Today is Gonna Be a Great Day” by Bowling for Soup

Those are the opening lines to the theme song to the Disney Channel cartoon series “Phineas and Ferb.”

For those who’ve never seen the show, it stars the two title characters, stepbrothers, who try to get the most out of every day of their summer vacation in the Tri-State Area.

Luckily for them, they’re cartoons … they get 104 days.

Students in Redlands Unified are about two weeks from ending of their summer vacations – which lasted as little as 46 days (Bryn Mawr’s now eliminated B-C-D tracks – Track A got done May 20) and only 68 for high schoolers.

Wow.

Of course, there are many reasons for the disappearance of summer break:

• First off, there aren’t as many farms for the kids to spend the summer working in the fields.
• With the economy the way it is, no one really can go on vacation.
• Oh, and the calendar has now been skewed so that the first semester ends before winter break instead of after it. And in exchange for starting earlier, there are more holiday weeks during the school year – all of Thanksgiving week off, three weeks of winter break and two weeks of spring break.

All that is all well and good, but summer is when everyone else is doing their thing, not during the extra week during the holidays or in the spring.

Take, for example, Little League. The two regional tournaments playing in San Bernardino will barely be ending pool play on the first day of school.

And how about that high schooler who went out and got a summer job? (By the way, does anyone just have a “summer job” any more?) Guess they’re going to have to give two-weeks notice this week.

What about the parents? My little one isn’t old enough for traditional schooling yet, but I’d have to imagine it’s easier to deal with child care over the longer, traditional summer. It has to be a little harder to find activities or have to make short-term arrangements for an extra week during the holidays.

Yeah, I realize I’m just being an old crank who went to school before air conditioning. You know the times when we used to get our school days shortened because of intense heat and/or smog.

Actually, in all honesty, with all the budget problems, schools should just ditch the traditional schedule all together and come up with a hybrid year-round schedule.

Four to six weeks on, one week off. It couldn’t hurt the students, who could use the weeks off to catch up on their studying and maybe increase their test scores. And teachers can plan shorter units to maximize learning.

It could work. It’s not like the kids are going to work the fields. Or build a roller coaster in their backyard.