When Aldine ISD introduced a plan in 2021 to extend the school year by 30 days at four campuses, staff at Vines EC/PK/K School told Lorena Cruz that the goal was to prevent learning loss over the summer.

Four years later, Cruz’s kindergartner and second grader may complain that their summer break is too short, but she sees her children holding on to what they learn in the classroom.

“If they have long vacations, when they return, everything they learned in the last year was more difficult for them,” Cruz said in Spanish.

Aldine continues to use the state-endorsed program to add more days to the school year, arguing that it helps keep student progress from slipping.

But attempts to implement a similar schedule at a few elementary schools in two other Houston-area districts — Alief and Spring ISDs — have fallen flat. District officials scrapped their respective programs after two years, citing funding issues, high staff turnover and parent complaints about the unique schedule.

The three districts’ experiences offer insights on the slow adoption of a program, called Additional Days School Year, or ADSY, that Texas education leaders hope will expand to more campuses across the state. Under the program, districts can receive some additional state funding if they add up to 30 instructional days to their school year at campuses serving elementary-age students. 

State lawmakers created ADSY in 2019 to help prevent the so-called “summer slide,” or dip in academic progress that takes place over the extended break. Students in the U.S. spend fewer weeks in school on average than children in developing countries, though they receive more hours of classroom instruction, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

When ADSY debuted in Texas for the 2021-22 school year, roughly 325 schools participated in the program, or roughly 6 percent of campuses with elementary-age students. Yet there’s been a negligible increase since then, with about 370 campuses on board. 

In the Greater Houston area, Aldine ISD is the only one of the largest 25 local districts with any campuses still participating in ADSY. Nine charter school districts and Stafford MSD take part in ADSY, with a combined 26 campuses extending their year.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, an advocate for a longer school year dating back to his time as a Dallas ISD school board member in the early 2010s, has promoted ADSY as a way to raise student achievement. In a November 2024 presentation to the State Board of Education, Morath cited data showing schools in the ADSY program — particularly those that spent months planning ahead for it — saw above-average gains in math and reading test scores in 2023.

“The starting point for the campuses that did ADSY is materially lower than the rest of the state, but then the gains, the year-over-year improvement for these campuses, is nothing short of gangbusters,” Morath told the board. (State officials haven’t yet released data for 2024.)

Aldine, Alief and Spring ISDs implemented ADSY in the 2021-22 years to help students recover from learning losses tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the districts have received mixed responses from parents and teachers since then. 

In an email, Aldine Chief Transformation Officer Adrian Bustillos said most families and staff members have responded positively to the longer school year.

“Campus administrators have highlighted the positive impact of ADSY on student growth, achievement, and family engagement,” Bustillos said. “Teachers appreciate the additional planning time and opportunities.”

Alief officials, on the other hand, cited numerous challenges in funding and staffing the program at Bush Elementary School, which returned to the district’s regular calendar in 2023-24. 

Spring also ended the district’s program at the former Clark Primary and Clark Intermediate schools, now known as Clark Elementary School, in 2023-24 after parents and teachers complained about scheduling difficulties. In an interview in January, Clark parent Howard Glover said he and his wife ultimately didn’t send their kids to school for the extra two weeks. 

“It just seemed like too much,” Glover said. “We wanted them to have their summer vacation.”

The case against summer

When Texas legislators passed a sweeping education finance bill with bipartisan support in 2019, most of the focus centered on how it devoted more money to public schools and capped local property tax rates. ADSY, which was tucked into the bill, generated few headlines by comparison.

The legislation provides districts with roughly half of the amount of funding they typically get for each student attending extra classes through ADSY. Districts are responsible for covering the remaining costs, the largest of which is campus staff salaries.

Lawmakers limited participation to schools that offer at least one grade level between prekindergarten and fifth grade. They also said participating districts must already have a minimum of 180 instructional days in their districtwide calendar, a threshold many school districts don’t meet.

Advocates have touted the program’s potential to bridge the performance gap between higher-income and lower-income students, and even make Texas students more competitive on the international stage.

“There’s a lot of research that shows if a student is in contact academically for more days out of the year, they do a lot better,” said Ben Mackey, the executive director of the education nonprofit Texas Impact Network, which partners with the TEA to help school districts implement ADSY and other initiatives. “But in Texas, we’ve had a trend of a lessening of the number of school days steadily over time.”

In its first year, about 60 Texas districts jumped aboard, including several large districts in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley each extending the school year at multiple campuses. Many served large shares of lower-income and Latino students.

 Aldine, Alief and Spring — which also enroll some of the Houston area’s highest-need students — all joined the following year, albeit with only a few out of their combined 100 eligible schools enlisting. 

In Aldine, district leaders told families that students would get more class time “directed at their individual needs” and more opportunities to work on projects with classmates, as well as extra recess. Teachers, meanwhile, would receive more time for training, lesson planning and working with small groups of students.

Growing pains

Early results from the extra time in school have been promising, state officials said, citing results from the state’s primary annual standardized test, known as STAAR.

Campuses that extended their school year saw a 7 percentage point increase in 2023 in the share of students scoring on grade level in math, better than the state average of 2 percentage points. Reading scores, meanwhile, stayed flat in ADSY schools while decreasing by 2 percentage points across the state.

The trends continued in 2024, with math gains outpacing the state by 3 percentage points and reading scores improving by 4 more percentage points than the state average.

“If we could see that [progress] across all of our schools, it would bring Texas into the level of proficiency as many of the Asian nations, so this is a very positive development,” Morath said during the 2024 State Board of Education presentation. 

Alief’s Bush Elementary saw big standardized test score gains and Spring’s Clark Elementary posted slightly above-average improvement relative to the state in 2022, though the results flattened in 2023 before both districts ended the extended year. The three Aldine elementary schools saw above-average gains in 2022 relative to the rest of the state, but minimal improvement in 2023 and 2024.

Despite these initial gains, the program has hit numerous roadblocks that have caused some districts to drop the program and others not to take it up at all. 

Spring officials ended the district’s pilot program at Clark Elementary after two years after 

“survey feedback revealed that the majority of stakeholders preferred to return to the traditional school calendar,” the district’s chief of innovation and student success, Matthew Pariseau, said in a statement. Clark Elementary families and teachers had trouble adapting, particularly those that had children attending other schools with different schedules, Pariseau said.

“Parents emphasized the importance of synchronized breaks across all grade levels to allow for family activities and travel,” Pariseau said.

Alief officials gave similar reasons for discontinuing ADSY at Bush Elementary, adding that the program also created a financial strain on the district. Teachers also were reluctant to work extra days, even for more pay, Alief Chief of Communications Kristyn Cathey wrote in an email.

“It was a big commitment for school staff and they had to be on board with it, and staff turnover was prolific,” Cathey said.

Brian Doran, the Texas Education Agency’s director of Expanded Learning Models, said districts statewide have run up against many of the same problems. The 180-day minimum requirement also has limited how many districts can participate in a state where the average school calendar is 172 days, Doran said. 

Doran also acknowledged that teachers facing burnout may be reluctant at first to embrace schedule changes or additional work. He argued, however, that the extra days allow school leaders to rearrange their schedules, giving teachers more flexibility on how they spend their days.

“While it’s a longer school year, what we would hope to see is that this is actually a more sustainable day-to-day experience for both students and staff,” Doran said. “So that’s a promising model that is small in scope right now and small in scale, but is definitely an exciting one to watch.”

Sweetening the deal

Although Doran said the TEA has seen “steady growth” in the number of campuses accessing ADSY funding, he acknowledged that he would like to see more districts come on board. 

Ben Mackey, the executive director of the education nonprofit Texas Impact Network, which partners with the TEA to help school districts implement ADSY and other initiatives, said districts are pushing for several potential fixes to bring more campuses into the program.

For instance, some advocates hope to lower the 180-day minimum for districts to 175 days, Mackey said. Another idea is to allow middle school campuses to operate on the same schedule as participating elementary schools.

One pressing concern may go unheeded, however.

“I haven’t heard anything around fully funding the program,” Mackey said.

Even if the state better accommodates school districts, Mackey said much of the program’s success depends on how districts communicate the extended school year to parents and get community buy-in — particularly when the benefits might not be immediately apparent.

“There’s a lot of programs that might actually show really good benefits over one year, but then the district pulls resources or changes the strategy or focuses on something else,” Mackey said. “It’s one of the biggest things that we have seen personally — consistency really matters.”

Districts looking to adopt or keep ADSY will have to win over more parents like Stacey Cates, whose son attended Aldine’s Vines School before moving up to Smith Elementary School, another campus with an extended calendar.

“The kids need it, but the teachers are tired, and if you have a tired teacher they won’t be teaching as well,” Cates said during a community meeting at Smith Elementary in early February. “We all had the full vacation during the summer and we all survived.”

Correction, Feb. 13: An earlier version of captions in this story incorrectly stated the nature of a community meeting held at Aldine ISD’s Smith Elementary School.

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