Marilyn J. Stenvall and Charlotte Lampe on year-round school

(CNN) -- Marilyn J. Stenvall is executive director of the National Association for Year-Round Education (NAYRE), an organization dedicated to improving learning through changes in the school calendar. NAYRE argues that summer learning loss is reduced if the school year is divided up more evenly. Stenvall has been active in the year-round school movement for 15-years.

Charlotte Lampe is an activist opposed to year-round education. As a parent, she experienced the program first-hand when it was implemented in the Cypress/Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas. Along with other parents, she fought the program, saying it yielded no academic benefits and put undue stress on the community. Eventually, all of the district's schools switched back to a traditional calendar.

Chat Moderator: Thank you for joining the Headline News chat today, Marilyn J. Stenvall and Charlotte Lampe, and welcome.

Marilyn Stenvall: Good morning. I am happy to be here.

Charlotte Lampe: This is from Texas. Howdy!

Chat Moderator: What effect have year-round schools had on the American school system?

Marilyn Stenvall: In terms of school reform, I believe year-round calendars have had a great effect. They show that there is summer learning loss, and a balanced calendar can help overcome that. It is important that we provide intervention rather than remediation, and that is a view espoused by the U.S. Department of Education at this time.

Charlotte Lampe: My view about year-round school is that it has shown a very disturbing trend for segregation. What I mean by that is that there is a great propensity for minority students and the poor to be victims of the year-round program. Using CNN's own figures, 41percent of programs done year-round are done for cost. Building schools for children is not the only thing that is affected with this.

You see a pare-down of staff and curriculum, which leads to an unequal access to education. We are talking about a new segregation tool of the millennium.

Marilyn Stenvall: I believe the respondent was speaking about multi-track calendars, where 25 percent to a third of the students are on vacation while the rest of the students attend school. This allows school to continue without double sessions in order to accommodate a growing number of students. It does save on building construction costs, and often multi-track schools are in heavily populated cities.

The calendar I was discussing originally was in a single-track school where all students and teachers follow the same calendar, and there are equal vacation times distributed throughout the year. This balanced calendar provides better education opportunities, and more than half the schools are on that calendar.

Both types cut down on the long summer break that the research out of Johns Hopkins University shows has been instrumental in learning loss for inner-city students, in particular.

MESSAGE BOARD Year round school

Charlotte Lampe: Let us take a very strong look at any research from the NAYRE because of what I call advocacy-type research, where they find studies to support their premise. The NAYRE is a non-profit organization supporting what they say is a beneficial program for children, but because they are a non-profit organization, you cannot get information on who supports this organization.

And as far as being able to substantiate any educational advances in year-round students, there are none that are substantive.

Single-track in my opinion, is the precursor to multi-track, and multi-track, in specific, is a detriment to modern education.

Question from Candyce-CNN: Do kids who attend year-round schools "test out" better than their counterparts in non-year-round schools?

Marilyn Stenvall: All studies from school districts -- and NAYRE does not provide support for any research studies -- have shown, whether single- or multi-track, that students, at the minimum, do as well as students on traditional calendars. Most studies show that students do better on balanced calendars than they do on traditional. That's true, particularly in the math-science areas, where students have fewer educational opportunities over the long summer break.

Charlotte Lampe: Our experience, in my school district, was far different. Most children do better with consistency. The more frequent breaks are just that -- they are more interruptions.

Marilyn Stenvall: The breaks being offered year-round are opportunities for tutorial work for those students who need more in-depth learning time during the school year. Summer school is not the same in that it provides remediation after failure. Inter-sessions can provide prevention throughout the school year.

Charlotte Lampe: My experience in having children in the year-round program couldn't be further from what my opponent is saying. We had, in our school district, single-, multi- and dual-track and traditional, so I feel that I can speak first-hand. Curriculum is cut, staff is cut because, in year-round school, you must first talk about cost.

My son was in single-track in eighth grade and could not take any class but U.S. history in summer school, and only one semester -- not one year, because the high school was on traditional. It prohibited him from advancing his education. It was like a double-whammy.

There is also a concern about single-track in high school because advanced placement for college is given in the months of April and May, and year-round kids are not on the same page.

Marilyn Stenvall: As a principal of a year-round single-track high school, it was more advantageous for advanced placement students, because the inter-session period is scheduled in advance of the advanced placement tests, and there is a higher pass rate.

Charlotte Lampe: I find that hard to believe, when they haven't finished their year -- very hard to believe.

Marilyn Stenvall: No school year is completed before advanced placement testing is given.

Question from Susie-CNN: The primary complaint I've heard about year-round schooling is that siblings in various schools (elementary and high school, for example) end up on different schedules, which makes family time and child care difficult. Are there any ideas on how to improve this situation?

Marilyn Stenvall: Sometimes that does happen when students are in different school districts. When students are on multi-track calendars in order to save space, almost all school districts grant their parents the right to have all of their children on the same track. However, school calendars differ in some respect at every level. Elementary school children don't follow the same days as high school students, so there is always some variability.

Charlotte Lampe: Count on your children being on different schedules. For one reason, elementary and junior high and high school students need different levels of calendars when you are in a year-round program. A disturbing problem with multi-track can be that certain tracks can only offer certain programs.

Families with several children most certainly will have different needs. You will be faced with either having children on the same track, or denying your children their specific needs.

Marilyn Stenvall: Multi-track calendars are a solution and not the problem. The problem is over-crowded schools. There are very few options people have when there isn't enough classroom space.

If there are double sessions, a family will find students going to school different times of the day with very few curriculum opportunities. Multi-track can be worked out satisfactorily to meet the needs, but it takes a community working together to see that the very best curriculum opportunities are offered at every level.

Charlotte Lampe: Multi-track is a severe cancer within public education. It is about whittling down education curriculum until children are not prepared for today's world. It is not the solution. It is a problem.

Chat Moderator: Do you have any final thoughts to share with us?

Marilyn Stenvall: The traditional school calendar was developed because we had an agrarian society. Children worked in agriculture, and they needed to help harvest the crops.

It is time that we looked at improving the education of students by involving them in education throughout the entire school year. It is important to overcome summer learning loss and to provide opportunity throughout the year for in-depth learning for our students.

The country calendar of the depression years is not used in any other industrialized country throughout the world. It is time for us to move on in the 21st century.

Charlotte Lampe: As we move into the 21st century, we must look at the year-round educational program with clear eyes. There is a disturbing trend that the prime target for any year-round program is the population group that is poor, minority, has a high mobility rate or overburdened school district budgets. We have traded the American agrarian calendar for the agrarian calendar of immigrants and minorities. With a sad heart I say that segregation is alive and well under the blanket of education.

Look to CNN today and watch the show on "Endless Summer." They show all the kids at the camps were white, and all the kids in the schools were black.

There is a trend for the parents in America to play heads-up ball.

Chat Moderator: Thank you for joining us today.

Charlotte Lampe: I'd like to hear from anyone who needs help about year-round schools. As a first-hand activist and parent, I would be more than happy to help anyone. Email me at adl2580@aol.com.