Cherelle Parker wants year-round school. Philly tried it before.

From 2000 through 2004, students at Grover Washington Middle School in Olney attended school for the same amount of days as the rest of the district, but those days were spread throughout the year.

From 2000 to 2004, students at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School, in Olney, attended year-round school. The single-school pilot was discontinued by Philadelphia School District officials.Read moreTom Gralish

by Kristen A. Graham

Published May 22, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

Cherelle Parker, the Democratic nominee for Philadelphia mayor, has pledged to “make Philadelphia a national leader in public education.”

One way Parker intends to get there? Year-round school.

Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. will present his five-year strategic plan on Thursday, and district officials have confirmed that a year-round school pilot program will be part of that plan, which Parker said that she backs. But details have not yet emerged about how many and which schools will participate, how they will be structured, who will staff them, when it would start, and how the district will get families to buy in.

The obstacles to keeping students in class year-round are hard to miss — the district’s buildings are old, plagued by environmental issues, and many do not support central air-conditioning. The teachers’ union would need to approve a massive schedule shift. And parents used to traditional calendars and with children at multiple schools are likely to balk.

But a year-round calendar is no stranger to Philadelphia.

From 2000 through 2004, students enrolled at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Olney attended school for 180 days — the minimum number of instructional days required in Pennsylvania and the same as their peers in the rest of the district — but those days were spread throughout the year, with no single, monthslong break.

At the time, officials said they wanted to reduce summer learning loss and help struggling students. Grover Washington administrators hoped the schedule change would cut failure rates by 50%; research shows that such schedules especially benefit students from economically disadvantaged families.

But then-Philadelphia chief executive officer Paul Vallas ultimately ended the experiment. It didn’t show enough promise to justify keeping or expanding it past the single school.

“Obviously, if they had had tremendous growth, we would have reconsidered,” Vallas told The Inquirer at the time. Grover Washington showed only modest standardized test-score growth.

Michael Galbraith worked at Grover Washington in the year-round school days, and still teaches English there.

Grover Washington was a brand-new school then, and Galbraith was part of a handpicked staff hired to work the nontraditional schedule of nine weeks in school, then three weeks off, year-round. But if parents wanted their children in school during “intersession” weeks, they could send them, for extra reading and math help, but also for extracurriculars.

“There were all sorts of possibilities,” Galbraith said. “There was less learning loss.”

Teachers could volunteer to teach the intersessions, or not, and typically, there were enough volunteers who wanted extra pay that staffing those weeks wasn’t a problem. Principal Michael Rosenberg told The Inquirer in 2001 that he recruited two retired teachers to fill in intersession gaps.

Galbraith loved the schedule because he thought it kept his students sharper, but also because he didn’t get exhausted the way he had teaching a traditional school year.

“I always felt super crispy — burned out — by May,” Galbraith said. “It would take two full weeks to decompress and get yourself back to feeling unruffled. I just never felt it in the years we had the year-round schedule.”

There were downsides, for sure, Galbraith said: Being the only school in the city with such a schedule meant attendance was spotty at times, especially when Grover Washington kids were supposed to be in session and everyone else was on break. It also proved to be a problem when students were supposed to be taking tests that benchmarked them against their peers across the district, because the calendars didn’t match up.

Ultimately, Galbraith said, it seems “the district is too big to make allowances for small variances” such as a year-round pilot. But if it were on the table, “I would go back to a year-round schedule in a second. I really feel like the upsides outweighed the glitches. It would just take a commitment from the district.”

At a news conference Monday, Parker suggested that schools start as early as 7:30 a.m. and stay open as late as 6 p.m., expanding schools’ opportunities for development, whether it be through building trades or newer technology, such as coding.

According to the National Association for Year-Round Education, an estimated 4% of schools, serving about three million students, followed a year-round schedule in 2020.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers declined to comment specifically on Parker’s year-round education plan. President Jerry Jordan, in a statement, offered Parker his congratulations and said she “is ready to lead on Day 1, and is ready to get to work for the city we all know and love.”