Do you follow your local school district's schooling days?

Currently we "loosely" follow the local school district's schooling days. For two reasons: 1) When my kids' public school friends have days off, we are able to get together with them for playdates without missing any school. 2) I like that my kids change grades at the same time as everyone else. I am not sure how I would keep track otherwise. Does that make sense?

When I say "loosely" follow the local school district, this is what I mean: We generally start about the same time, after Labor Day, sometimes a week or so before if we are getting bored with summer. We take the same Christmas and Spring Breaks. We take the same summer breaks. However, we are usually done a couple weeks before. We do not, however, take the same "lack of funding days", "parent-teacher conference days" or "snow days". Oh, and we also take all the federal holidays off.

We have been doing this for the past eight years....but.....for the past couple years I have been tossing around the idea of year-round schooling. I have several home-school friends who school year round. One family literally schools every day, year round, taking short breaks every now and then. Another family does five weeks on, three weeks off. Or maybe it is five on, two off....? At any rate, the mother told me that it works out perfectly for taking Thanksgiving/Christmas/Spring breaks.

Now here are my thoughts on why I think this "might" work for our family.

1. After about 6 weeks of summer, we get BORED. We love the summer, playing outside constantly, not a tight schedule, free to go when we want to do something....but we LOVE the structure of our school days. 
2. This would allow us to not feel constricted by the public schools' idea of what the school year should be. And since we home-school, why not?
3. It would give us a little catch up time for those of my children who struggle in certain areas. 
4. If I planned it right, we wouldn't be doing much different than what we are doing now, just longer breaks and schooling during the summer for a couple times.

So I am curious as to what your family does! Do you follow a "normal" schedule or do you school year round?