Imagine school without summer break. All the memories of baseball games you played at the park turn into memories of a classroom, no more counting down the days until summer, no more looking forward to break, just school all year round every year of your life from the age of five to the age of eighteen.

This is a reality that many students in Minnesota face. Schools like Crossroads Elementary School in St. Paul have a year-round policy. Year-round schooling is a trend that is seen in districts all across the nation, and its popularity is growing. Chicago has put over 350 of its public schools on some type of year-round calendar in the last ten years. The idea behind year-round schooling is that if kids have less time off, they retain more material and do not need to spend as much time reviewing at the beginning of the year.

Year-round schools make up for summer break by having 45 consecutive school days separated by fifteen day breaks. Many advocates of this method justify it by saying that summer breaks were created when kids had to help their parents on the farm and it is therefore obsolete.

Can you really use that as an argument? The M&M was created so soldiers could have chocolate that wouldn’t melt in the field but we don’t call for the end of the candy casing do we? Just because something was created for one purpose doesn’t mean it can’t fill another.

Year-round schooling is wrong. It may have its scholastic benefits, but it strips away one’s childhood. When a child spends so much time in school without a long break, their entire life centers around school. When I was a child summer was my time to live. No worries and no cares. Just time to be a child. Sure, year-round systems offer three week long breaks, but throughout the break, school is still looming over your head. Again, I don’t doubt that a year-round school would definitely have it’s academic benefits, but I believe that the ends could never justify the means.

Right now, kids who are in year-round schools can’t go to summer camp, they can’t play in summer sports leagues, they can’t travel for more than a few weeks at a time. They are missing out on all of these experiences that a school could never give you, the kind of experiences that shape who you are.

There is no doubt that high school is a huge stress; week long breaks and even two week long breaks just don’t cut it. I can confidently say that if in my three years here if I never had a long break where I didn’t have to worry about school at all, I would have been driven insane. As a teenager summer is the great stress reliever and no three week break, no matter how often, could ever take its place.