c	Year-round Schools Are An Odius Idea. Opinion - The Virginian-Pilot They deprive kids of carefree childhoods, ignore the benefits of extended vacations and operate on the false assumption that children suffer academic amnesia when given a 10-week summer break. We can only hope that in a decade or two, year-round schools will be tossed atop the slagheap of American educational experiments. There they'll join other failed gimmicks. Like the muddled ``modern math'' of the 1960s, the ``open classrooms'' of the '70s and today's foolish infatuation with the whole-language approach to reading. Nevertheless, the Virginia Beach school district recently announced that it is expanding its year-round program to a fourth elementary school, even as Norfolk and Suffolk are poised to scratch theirs. The reason the Beach program is even mildly tolerable is that it institutes year-round calendars only in schools with strong grassroots support. Best of all, the district makes it easy for children to transfer out of these schools if their parents object. Five years ago, when 12-month calendars were gathering momentum in Hampton Roads, I wrote an op-ed piece denouncing the idea. I argued that summer breaks are not necessarily breaks in education. In fact, the leisurely vacations of my childhood allowed me and my friends to shake off the numbing shackles of schoolwork and embark on summerlong book benders. Both of my parents worked. We had neither air-conditioning nor a pool. But my summers were idyllic because I had a library card and a shade tree in the yard. It was all I needed. Our little library offered prizes for the most books read, and the competition was fierce. The summer I was 12 marked my immersion in French history. It began with a book of historical fiction called ``Desiree,'' about the young silk merchant's daughter who was ditched by Napoleon for the dazzling Josephine, and it ended with a dizzying array of bloody books on the French Revolution. The next summer I moved on to the labor movement, devouring dozens of tomes about Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, Dorothy Day, Joe Hill and the Molly Maguires. That was also when the local librarian called my mother at work to tattle when I tried to check out a yellowed copy of Karl Marx's ``Das Kapital.'' My wise mom, short on formal education but long on reading, told her to let me have it. Another summer, I discovered my Irish roots after finding a volume of poetry by Yeats. It was impossible to read Yeats without wanting to know more about the beguiling Maud Gonne. And once you met Maud Gonne, you had to learn about the heroes of the Easter Rising of 1916. It was a phase. But it was also an education. The fact is, my summers of reading served me well. Better in many ways than the interminable hours spent behind battered desks in New Jersey public schools. To this day, I can't remember the dates of the Mesolithic period, or what the Pythagorean theorem states, or how to conjugate German verbs. But I can tell you about guillotines, Fenians and Dorothy Day's radical thoughts on poverty. Still, when I first lamented the arrival of year-round schools, some local educators accused me of Luddite thinking. They said that those lazy summers I remembered were as dated as the Hula-Hoops we played with back then. Today's children need a competitive edge, they scolded. They don't have a moment to waste. Seems to me that's exactly what kids need today. Moments to waste. They need a break from schedules and SOLS and organized sports. They need time to play, daydream and read for pleasure. Year-round schools are not the answer. Our tax dollars would be better spent on a fleet of bookmobiles. Reach Kerry at 446-2306 or at kerry.dougherty@att.net BACK