Comment 2 for bug 532428

Section durations that correspond with term lengths is rather fundamental to SchoolTool's structure right now.

Essentially, you've got a Year > Term > Section containment structure. You can hack around that a bit, as you've discovered, but, especially if you don't have a hard boundary between school years, that is, there is no point at which all sections end and then new ones begin, it is going to be... messy.

In a different context without a clean year/term structure (an online "virtual" school), we spec'ed out a plan to create a separate "ongoing" container (instead of a year) that would simply hold all the sections for that school. We could also make it possible to define unique start and end dates for sections in that container. This would not be very difficult, but probably in the range of 1-2 developer/months.

Currently, however, it is not high on our list of priorities for funded SchoolTool development. I wouldn't count on it being done as part of the internally funded, core SchoolTool development effort this year. OTOH, if someone else could fund the work we could find a developer to do the project. Or if you have experienced Python/Zope developers, we might be able to help them get started.