It’s hard to believe I turned the page on my calendar to August.

Summer is flying by and by some accounts it’s already over. My grandsons, who are students in the Vicksburg Warren School District, started back to school Friday.

That just seems crazy. Back when I was a child, school didn’t crank back up until September. Then again, we didn’t get random breaks throughout the school year.

Looking at the VWSD’s calendar, within the 2024-25 school year, students have 30 days of holiday and that does not include the two 63-percent days.

No wonder the students have to go back in August.

I don’t recall having that many days off when I was a student here in Vicksburg. There were Christmas and spring breaks, a couple of days for Thanksgiving and Easter and government holidays, but outside of that our little butts were sitting at a desk.

But I certainly didn’t mind, because for those three long, glorious months of summer I didn’t have to worry about homework.

The VWSD is not the only school that has gotten away from a three-month summer break. It seems as if that is the norm now-a-days.

In fact, my editor tells me his children have school year-round, meaning they get extended breaks throughout the year. He said he likes how it works, and I guess for working parents that may be a better option.

When I was an elementary and high school student, my mom and most of her friends didn’t work outside the home. So, juggling a career and their children being home for the summer wasn’t an issue.

We live in different times now. Most mothers have full-time jobs.

Research has also shown that students who have a year-round school schedule fare “slightly better” as it pertains to academics. Maybe so. Kids do seem pretty smart these days. However, us Baby Boomers can still hold our own.

And to prove it, I, like my younger counterparts, used the internet to find information on the possible pros and cons of year-round school. And while doing so, I also found an interesting tidbit on the traditional school schedule.

According to soeonline.american.edu, it seems that, while some have linked an extended summer break to our country’s “agrarian roots” when farming and harvest cycles drove the economy, others have pointed out that harvesting cycles don’t require long summer breaks. Therefore, it was suggested that the extensive summer breaks were really couched around the weather.

The website stated, “this extensive time off is more likely the legacy of wealthy urban dwellers leaving the city for long periods to escape the heat.”

Well, shoot. That makes perfect sense — it’s just now instead of being a wealthy urban dweller and scooting off to a milder climate, we just send the kids back to air-conditioned schools.

Terri Cowart Frazier writes features for The Vicksburg Post. She can be reached at terri.fazier@vicksburgpost.com.