All Year Cure-AII?

Every summer. U.S. school buildings stand idle while their value declines and interest on construction bonds piles higher. Teachers, in desperately short supply during the school year, take long vacations they cannot afford, or pad out undersized incomes with temporary jobs. Last week, as dozens of other cost-burdened school boards have done before, Tennessee's Davidson County board of education hacked through a knot of problems to what seemed at first a simple, one-stroke solution: run the school system twelve months a year on a four-quarter plan, with one-fourth of the children on vacation each quarter.

The advantages at first looked bright. Without building any more schools or hiring any more teachers, the overloaded system could handle a third again as many students; and, with teachers working twelve months (with two weeks vacation) instead of the usual ten. salaries could be raised a respectable 20%. A committee turned up other points in favor of the plan: students with failing grades, or out of school because of illness, would have to make up only one quarter instead of at least a half year; fewer textbooks would be needed; with three-fourths of the competition in school, older students would have an easier time getting vacation jobs; children could start school within three months of their sixth birthdays, instead of waiting up to a year.

Then, with gathering dismay, the committee began to see why communities that had tried the plan (among them: Nashville, Omaha, Newark, Amarillo, Tex., Aliquippa, Pa.) had abandoned it within a few years. With new classes starting each quarter, at least three different sections would have to be taught in each subject, too many except for sizable schools (elementary schools of more than 540 pupils, secondary schools of more than 1,600). Tennessee heat would make expensive air conditioning a necessity for the summer quarter. Building repairs, normally done during vacations, would have to be carried out on weekends or while school was in session. Teachers would have better incomes, but no time to recuperate from a year's siege of youngsters or to take professional courses. Four separate graduations and commencements would be required, and some graduations would be inconveniently timed for college entrance. Transfers to or from four-quarter schools would be endlessly complicated.

Biggest problem: vacation quarters would have to be assigned arbitrarily. Families would revolt when they found four children taking vacations at different times; coaches would swallow their whistles in rage when hot-shot halfbacks were told to take the fall months off. In communities where the four-quarter system has been tried, students have rebelled at taking out-of-season vacations, breezed through school without stop, graduated too young to work and too immature for college. Prospect at week's end: no four-quarter cure-all for Davidson County schools.

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