Post-Labor Day school start: Disservice to students and to taxpayers

By Jim LeMunyon

If you have a school-age child, you know there is less learning going on in school during these last weeks of the year.

High school students taking advanced placement classes completed their exams on May 13, the last date that such tests are taken nationally. Virginia students in third through 12th grade have, for the most part, completed state mandated Standards of Learning tests for various subjects. These tests must be completed by early June to comply with certain federal rules.

So with the testing completed, why are most Virginia students in school until mid-June or later? State law specifies that students must receive 180 days of instruction but can't attend school before Labor Day - unless a waiver is granted from the State Board of Education. Such waivers are usually issued to jurisdictions with frequent winter weather closings and affect less than 25 percent of Virginia's school children, mostly in the more mountainous parts of the state.

Since the school calendar is out of sync with standardized testing, Virginia's school year is effectively only 165 to 170 days long for most jurisdictions, even though teachers try to make the best of the last two or three weeks of the school year.

The post-Labor Day start law was enacted in the 1980s at the urging of the state's hospitality and tourism industry and is often referred to the "King's Dominion law." The idea is that Virginians would be more inclined to visit the state's tourist destinations in late August or early September if their children aren't in school until after Labor Day.

Efforts to repeal this law in the General Assembly to allow local school boards to fix the start and ending dates of their individual school calendars has been met with strong opposition from the tourism and hospitality industry. Interestingly, advocates of this law don't seem to be able to explain why there would be a net loss of business if the school year ended earlier in June and families took more vacations then, rather than around Labor Day.

Virginia needs to find a way to better support both tourism and education by giving local school boards the choice to start the school year in August and end earlier in June. Here's why:

- Students deserve as much instructional time as possible before standardized tests are taken so they are equipped with the knowledge to perform well. This is especially true for high school students taking advanced placement tests, as they compete with students from across the country for college acceptance. Students taking these tests in states that start school in August have an advantage over Virginians;

- The cost of keeping schools open in Virginia is nearly $50 million per day, when both the state and local funding contributions are considered. We can't afford to underutilize, or more accurately, squander more than $500 million of tax money each year by keeping children in school for weeks after testing is completed. That $500 million could be better spent preparing our children to compete for jobs in a global market in fields like science and technology rather than on movie and field days;

- Of the 20 states from Delaware to Florida to Texas, Virginia is the only one with a post-Labor Day school start law. All others start in August or allow local governments and school boards to decide. Unsurprisingly, the resorts in Delaware, Maryland, the Carolinas, Florida and the Gulf Coast manage to boast vibrant tourism and hospitality industries and allow schools to open before Labor Day. Why not Virginia?

- There is also a matter of principle. Tourism advocates are using the force of law to keep Virginia's children out of school until the beginning of September with the hope that some small fraction of them will show up at an amusement park or a beach. In a state that prides itself on limited government and individual liberty, the authoritarian nature of the King's Dominion law is out of place.

Virginia's tourism and hospitality industry is certainly valuable as an employer throughout the state, and the industry deserves our support. State governments have a wide range of economic development incentives that can be used to promote business and industry. If Virginia's hospitality and tourism industry needs the state's assistance to compete with other states, then the General Assembly ought to take a serious look at such incentives. Manipulating the school calendar in state law shouldn't be one of them.

Jim LeMunyon, a Republican, represents portions of Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia's House of Delegates.