Many parents breathed a sigh of relief when the state Board of Education approved a unified school calendar, marking the welcome end of a well-intentioned but impractical experiment with various year-round calendars 17 years ago.

The initiative to allow individual schools to set their own academic start dates and end dates was part of the school-community-based management (SCBM) movement, an effort to break up the centralized control of the state's public schools.

Changing the school calendar at each campus was the easiest and thus the first reform made to carry out the idea of local school management. But as a practical matter, it wreaked havoc with family schedules.

Parents found it difficult to arrange their own vacations and childcare to coincide with their kids' schedules, a particularly knotty problem when their children attended different schools.

Some of the state's alternative campuses — the charter schools and the multitrack schools set up to accommodate a larger student body — will retain their own schedules.

But it was a wise decision by the board to abandon the crazy-quilt calendar of the majority of schools. Local management of schools is a goal that deserves our pursuit, but budgetary management should be the focus. Some aspects work better left under centralized control.