August Openings Put Schools On Hot Seat

By Bess Keller

It may not have the same ring as "See You in September," but more and more school districts are telling students to make sure they're back in August for the first day of school—sometimes as early as the first week of the month.

A recent national survey of public schools by a Connecticut company that tracks school trends found that while 51 percent of public schools had opened before Sept. 1 in 1988, that figure had leaped to 76 percent by last year, with the biggest gain in the early 1990s.

"The trend was a pretty dramatic shift," said Kathleen Brantley, the director of product development for Market Data Retrieval of Shelton, Conn., which collected the...