Wake County's year-round schools with multiple tracks aren't doing better academically than traditional-calendar schools, when adjusted for demographics or other school characteristics, researchers found in a report from Elon University set to be presented to the school board Tuesday.

Year-round schools have long been thought to potentially improve academics by reducing the length of summer break -- time spent potentially forgetting the academics of the prior school year. But research nationally has been spotty on how effective that calendar type is toward actually improving students' academic performance.

Wake County started multi-track year-round calendars in 2007 to address overcrowding, not as an academic improvement measure. The multi-track system splits a school's student body into four groups that "track in" and "track out" over a 12-month period, with just three groups attending the school on any given schoolday. That allows the school to increase capacity by 25%. The district started year-round schools in the 1990s in magnet schools, though they didn't have multiple tracks.

"We're really talking about savings in construction and capacity costs," school board Chairman Chris Heagarty said.

That's what the board is weighing as it considers changing overcrowded Lake Myra Elementary in Wendell from a single-track year-round school into a multi-track one, to increase its capacity. A decision won't come until later this spring.

Lindsey Erwin, a parent at Lake Myra, knows her Wendell neighborhood has grown quite a bit.

She likes the school and isn't too worried about it turning into a multi-track year-round school. In fact, she attended one herself as a child in another state.

"I would love smaller class sizes," she said. She hopes shifting to multi-track calendar could be a solution toward children getting better attention from their teachers.

But one thing does worry her -- that some teachers won't want to teach multiple tracks over the course of the year.

"Are we going to lose teachers because that's not something they want to do?" she said.

The latest findings suggest that multi-track year-round schools may not be providing the academic benefits hoped for by some, though many of them still provide that benefit of increasing school capacity by allowing more students to attend them at different times throughout the year via multiple attendance tracks.

The school system, for its part, doesn't tout academic performance as a benefit of year-round schools.

Elon University professor Katy Rouse, who helped write the new report, and a colleague drew similar conclusions when studying Wake's multi-track year-round schools in 2012.

In 2015, Rouse and two other researchers found small positive effects of multi-track year-round schools on Wake's lowest-income students, who would otherwise be attending severely crowded schools.

On Tuesday, Rouse told the school board during a work session that schools that are too crowded can have negative effects on student performance, so converting to multi-track year-round calendars can actually help offset those potential negative effects.

The district has 37 year-round elementary schools and nine year-round middle schools. Most are multi-track. The district has 16 year-round schools that aren't multi-track, 13 at the elementary level and three at the middle school level. No high schools have year-round calendars.

Rouse, at the request of the school system, helped compile a brief examining the performance of the Wake County Public School System's schools. The report analyzed test score data at each school, measured how well different demographic groups performed across schools and adjusted for school characteristics, such as the percentage of students with limited English proficiency or qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch.

The report found that the district's multi-track year-round schools, which are concentrated in faster-growing and more affluent western Wake County, performed better on tests than the rest of the county's schools. But when researchers adjusted for how well different demographic groups performed at those and other schools, and how other schools with similar demographics performed, they found multi-track year-round students didn't perform better than traditional calendar students.

Still, year-round schools provide an additional benefit to adding capacity to schools. That if they're done on a multi-track system, as most of Wake's year-round schools are, though some aren't.

That's a reason why the schools are so common in the county's fast-growing western corridor, where overcrowded schools are a fact of life. But the county also has multi-track year-round schools in eastern portions that aren't growing as fast and aren't overcapacity.

Those eastern schools, the report noted, are unnecessarily costing extra money by paying teachers and other workers for 12 months of work instead of 10 months. The report recommends the district reconsider assignment and calendars where necessary to operate more efficiently. Researchers noted that, based on their data analysis, academics likely wouldn't suffer for shifting some of those schools from multi-track year-round calendars to traditional 10-month school calendars. Researchers recommended converting those schools to only one calendar, continuing to use multi-track year-round calendars to reduce crowding in fast-growing areas, and working with local child care providers for "affordable and accessible" child care during multi-track year-round schools' "track out" periods.

On the district's webpage for year-round schools, the district cites benefits noted by parents for the schools, including students being able to be "rested and refreshed" during the school year. The website doesn't note academic benefits, but states that schools on multi-track, year-round calendars can increase their capacity by 25%, "which helps maximize the use of our school facilities in highly populated areas of our district."

On Tuesday, the school board isn't planning to consider any changes to calendars based on the policy brief.

The board is scheduled to consider one change, during Tuesday's work session, related to calendars, which the board would ultimately vote on at a later date. The district is recommending turning Lake Myra Elementary from a single-track year-round school into a multi-track year-round school, because the school is overcapacity.

Currently, students attend year-round but don't track in or out, so the calendar doesn't provide for extra student capacity.

The proposed change would provide relief at the school, which doesn't have any trailers for extra classroom space and which is expected to enroll 730 students next year, or 18.5% above the 616-student capacity. It would go into effect for the 2026-27 school year.