A member of the Marshall County Board of Education says people have opinions, a lot of them, about a possibility they're considering that would allow for year round schools.

"Between being sick, snow days, if you calculate all of those or subtract those things into it, our kids are going less than six months of the entire year for learning,"  Board Member Lori Kestner said on Friday's MetroNews Talkline.

That's part of the reason why, she says, they've started researching year round schools and have looked at the three year round schools operating already today in Kanawha County.

A year round school calendar is set up with more breaks for students, but those breaks are shorter.  Breaks are set up to deal with possible bad weather or other events that keep students out of school now.

"They still have a summer vacation of five weeks instead of ten," Kestner said.  "There's periods throughout the wintertime, when we normally have snow days and it's difficult, we have a lot of delays between Christmas and January."

Shorter breaks, she says, help students retain more.

"There's a lot of statistics out there as to how much of your education that you lose, or your learning that you lose, when you have those long breaks."

Kestner says it could take, at least, three years to create a year round school or schools in Marshall County.  There appears to be community support for a year round schedule at a new middle school and high school in the Cameron area.

She says there is also support for year round schools from Governor Joe Manchin.

"In order for our kids to compete in a global market today, if we don't change something, we can only continue to have the same results as we have now," she says.