School Calendar 2023-2024

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The religious holiday "problem" is helped the next two school years by many of them falling on weekends. In the 23-24 calendar there are only two stand-alone religious holidays:

Yom Kippur 9/25
Eid al Fitr 4/10

In the 24-25 calendar there are four, but two of them are paired with quarter-ends, so again, only two "random" days off.

Rosh Hashanah 10/3
Diwali 11/1
Lunar New Year 1/29 (TW, combined with Q2 end)
Eid al Fitr 3/31 (combined with Q3 end)

The problem comes in the 25-26 calendar when a bunch of them come during the school year. I'm sure it would be completely insensitive, but I wonder if they could gather a religious contingent to pick one between Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur and one of the Eids. Or just look at the absentee data from the past.

Rosh Hashanah 9/23
Yom Kippur 10/2
Diwali 10/21
Lunar New Year 2/17 (TW)
Eid-al-Fitr 3/20
Orthodox Good Friday (TW)
Eid-al-Adha

Or get rid of all of them since this is a public, secular school system.

Any school board candidate who will advocate for getting rid of these absurd days off of school has my vote.

This!! 1000% agree. It is getting out of hand.

Dear school board,
There is no pleasing these people. They are probably the same ones who asked for a three year calendar to plan vacations. They are youngkin trolls looking for ANY angle (including the calendar) too trumpet about voting out the school board. There are more sane people and parents in the county that outnumber these fools. Please don't listen.

Thanks,

Most People

Huh? I’m a lifelong Dem. Never voted R in my life. I am voting for any R to replace this school board, though. Will be a first for me.
And I am far from alone. Most of my D friends hate the religion days off. I think the out of touch folks are you all who support endless four day weeks

DP
I can't say this until I know who the candidates are, D or R.

[Anonymous]

So all those religious holidays, even evening ones, those are days off from school?

[Anonymous]

The calendar for next year is decent.

2024-25 and 2025-26 are a huge mess!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So all those religious holidays, even evening ones, those are days off from school?

If you are talking about the O days, they are school days. They need to stop putting big Os on the calendar that make it seem like it stands for “off.”

O= new instruction can be taught, but no tests or events
/O= new instruction can be taught; they should be able to have tests; there would be no after-school activities allowed except sport/backend/theater/etc practices.

I think.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The calendar is basically what we have now but they majorly screwed up with the teacher workdays. The "fixed" the calendar at the expense of the teachers. This is what they always do. We bear the burden of all their bad decisions.

Teachers don't need 3 or 4 workdays at the end of the year. There's nothing to do. I need the work days DURING the school year. You know...when I have work to do. We can't use those work days for planning for next year b/c a lot of us don't know what we're teaching next year. We can't use them for our online trainings (I think the estimate is that it's about two days worth of watching videos for the yearly mandatory trainings) because they don't count for next year unless done after July 1. We can't use them to grade papers, write IEPs, write narratives, write goals, update gradebooks, mark progress, etc because...we have no students at that point and the year is over. All of that's been done already. So the only thing left is for us to sit in more useless PD that no one asked for or needs. We need unencumbered work time DURING the school year. Period. And the school board is oblivious to that because most of them have never taught a day in their lives.

This relentless crusade for more 5 days weeks is exactly what another poster said...a direct response to the addition of the religious holidays. The SB needs to man up and just call a tell these parents tough crap. The religious days were added. It is was it is. And the work days DURING the year are needed as well. They should have balanced those out as best they could while not short changing either. But instead, we get this mess. The fact that there were so many no votes + reluctant yeses should have been clue #1 that there was still work to be done.

Nonsense. It's the BS religious holidays that need to go, not the TWDs. Ax Diwali, YK, Eid and RH. Eliminate the extra Labor Day Friday, and only keep the Monday, and we're good. Then you can add back the TWDs.

These religious holidays are freaking ridiculous. And god help us when they decide that they weren't woke enough and add Lunar New Year and Chuseok in the next go-round of calendar votes.

Once again, random people on the Internet can come up with a better school calendar than all of the lauded professional FCPS staff and the idiotic School Board.

No, because that random person didn’t even know about the state law that requires schools to be closed the Friday before Labor Day. All we have here are armchair experts who know nothing.

Nonsense. Most of us knew about the law and most of us can come up with better calendars.

To be fair, FCPS could also come up with a better calendar if the SB had not forced them to add all the religious days.

These are the major issues:
All the religious holidays
And being married to 180 days rather than 990 hours.

Major issues:
Professional days
Religious holidays
Veterans Day

You forgot some major issues:
Two week christmas break
Winter break tied to Christmas
Spring break tied to Easter

Winter break will always be tied to Xmas in a country where a huge huge majority celebrates Xmas. Pretending anything else is ridiculous.
FCPS was perfectly willing to divorce spring break from Easter - but unless the other districts shift and follow us we have a real operational problem with staffing.
They need flexibility on two weeks for Xmas. Sometimes it makes sense and some times not.

Too damn bad. If including other religions’ holidays are ridiculous and they need to be “axed,” no problem, just as long as school attendance is compulsory on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The calendar is basically what we have now but they majorly screwed up with the teacher workdays. The "fixed" the calendar at the expense of the teachers. This is what they always do. We bear the burden of all their bad decisions.

Teachers don't need 3 or 4 workdays at the end of the year. There's nothing to do. I need the work days DURING the school year. You know...when I have work to do. We can't use those work days for planning for next year b/c a lot of us don't know what we're teaching next year. We can't use them for our online trainings (I think the estimate is that it's about two days worth of watching videos for the yearly mandatory trainings) because they don't count for next year unless done after July 1. We can't use them to grade papers, write IEPs, write narratives, write goals, update gradebooks, mark progress, etc because...we have no students at that point and the year is over. All of that's been done already. So the only thing left is for us to sit in more useless PD that no one asked for or needs. We need unencumbered work time DURING the school year. Period. And the school board is oblivious to that because most of them have never taught a day in their lives.

This relentless crusade for more 5 days weeks is exactly what another poster said...a direct response to the addition of the religious holidays. The SB needs to man up and just call a tell these parents tough crap. The religious days were added. It is was it is. And the work days DURING the year are needed as well. They should have balanced those out as best they could while not short changing either. But instead, we get this mess. The fact that there were so many no votes + reluctant yeses should have been clue #1 that there was still work to be done.

Nonsense. It's the BS religious holidays that need to go, not the TWDs. Ax Diwali, YK, Eid and RH. Eliminate the extra Labor Day Friday, and only keep the Monday, and we're good. Then you can add back the TWDs.

These religious holidays are freaking ridiculous. And god help us when they decide that they weren't woke enough and add Lunar New Year and Chuseok in the next go-round of calendar votes.

Once again, random people on the Internet can come up with a better school calendar than all of the lauded professional FCPS staff and the idiotic School Board.

No, because that random person didn’t even know about the state law that requires schools to be closed the Friday before Labor Day. All we have here are armchair experts who know nothing.

Nonsense. Most of us knew about the law and most of us can come up with better calendars.

To be fair, FCPS could also come up with a better calendar if the SB had not forced them to add all the religious days.

These are the major issues:
All the religious holidays
And being married to 180 days rather than 990 hours.

Major issues:
Professional days
Religious holidays
Veterans Day

You forgot some major issues:
Two week christmas break
Winter break tied to Christmas
Spring break tied to Easter

Winter break will always be tied to Xmas in a country where a huge huge majority celebrates Xmas. Pretending anything else is ridiculous.
FCPS was perfectly willing to divorce spring break from Easter - but unless the other districts shift and follow us we have a real operational problem with staffing.
They need flexibility on two weeks for Xmas. Sometimes it makes sense and some times not.

Too damn bad. If including other religions’ holidays are ridiculous and they need to be “axed,” no problem, just as long as school attendance is compulsory on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

You sound unhinged. This doesn’t even make sense. Kids have never been required to attend school in the evenings. And it’s not compulsory to attend on O days, so why would it be compulsory on Christmas? It would be an O day. We don’t drag the Jews in on Yom Kippur. Why would we drag kids in on Christmas?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The calendar is basically what we have now but they majorly screwed up with the teacher workdays. The "fixed" the calendar at the expense of the teachers. This is what they always do. We bear the burden of all their bad decisions.

Teachers don't need 3 or 4 workdays at the end of the year. There's nothing to do. I need the work days DURING the school year. You know...when I have work to do. We can't use those work days for planning for next year b/c a lot of us don't know what we're teaching next year. We can't use them for our online trainings (I think the estimate is that it's about two days worth of watching videos for the yearly mandatory trainings) because they don't count for next year unless done after July 1. We can't use them to grade papers, write IEPs, write narratives, write goals, update gradebooks, mark progress, etc because...we have no students at that point and the year is over. All of that's been done already. So the only thing left is for us to sit in more useless PD that no one asked for or needs. We need unencumbered work time DURING the school year. Period. And the school board is oblivious to that because most of them have never taught a day in their lives.

This relentless crusade for more 5 days weeks is exactly what another poster said...a direct response to the addition of the religious holidays. The SB needs to man up and just call a tell these parents tough crap. The religious days were added. It is was it is. And the work days DURING the year are needed as well. They should have balanced those out as best they could while not short changing either. But instead, we get this mess. The fact that there were so many no votes + reluctant yeses should have been clue #1 that there was still work to be done.

Nonsense. It's the BS religious holidays that need to go, not the TWDs. Ax Diwali, YK, Eid and RH. Eliminate the extra Labor Day Friday, and only keep the Monday, and we're good. Then you can add back the TWDs.

These religious holidays are freaking ridiculous. And god help us when they decide that they weren't woke enough and add Lunar New Year and Chuseok in the next go-round of calendar votes.

Once again, random people on the Internet can come up with a better school calendar than all of the lauded professional FCPS staff and the idiotic School Board.

No, because that random person didn’t even know about the state law that requires schools to be closed the Friday before Labor Day. All we have here are armchair experts who know nothing.

Nonsense. Most of us knew about the law and most of us can come up with better calendars.

To be fair, FCPS could also come up with a better calendar if the SB had not forced them to add all the religious days.

These are the major issues:
All the religious holidays
And being married to 180 days rather than 990 hours.

Major issues:
Professional days
Religious holidays
Veterans Day

You forgot some major issues:
Two week christmas break
Winter break tied to Christmas
Spring break tied to Easter

Winter break will always be tied to Xmas in a country where a huge huge majority celebrates Xmas. Pretending anything else is ridiculous.
FCPS was perfectly willing to divorce spring break from Easter - but unless the other districts shift and follow us we have a real operational problem with staffing.
They need flexibility on two weeks for Xmas. Sometimes it makes sense and some times not.

Too damn bad. If including other religions’ holidays are ridiculous and they need to be “axed,” no problem, just as long as school attendance is compulsory on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Sorry, in most of the country there are too many absences on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day for there to be school (and again, it's a federal holiday). It's actually on you and the school board to prove that all these extra religious holidays are necessary in a secular public school system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The calendar is basically what we have now but they majorly screwed up with the teacher workdays. The "fixed" the calendar at the expense of the teachers. This is what they always do. We bear the burden of all their bad decisions.

Teachers don't need 3 or 4 workdays at the end of the year. There's nothing to do. I need the work days DURING the school year. You know...when I have work to do. We can't use those work days for planning for next year b/c a lot of us don't know what we're teaching next year. We can't use them for our online trainings (I think the estimate is that it's about two days worth of watching videos for the yearly mandatory trainings) because they don't count for next year unless done after July 1. We can't use them to grade papers, write IEPs, write narratives, write goals, update gradebooks, mark progress, etc because...we have no students at that point and the year is over. All of that's been done already. So the only thing left is for us to sit in more useless PD that no one asked for or needs. We need unencumbered work time DURING the school year. Period. And the school board is oblivious to that because most of them have never taught a day in their lives.

This relentless crusade for more 5 days weeks is exactly what another poster said...a direct response to the addition of the religious holidays. The SB needs to man up and just call a tell these parents tough crap. The religious days were added. It is was it is. And the work days DURING the year are needed as well. They should have balanced those out as best they could while not short changing either. But instead, we get this mess. The fact that there were so many no votes + reluctant yeses should have been clue #1 that there was still work to be done.

Nonsense. It's the BS religious holidays that need to go, not the TWDs. Ax Diwali, YK, Eid and RH. Eliminate the extra Labor Day Friday, and only keep the Monday, and we're good. Then you can add back the TWDs.

These religious holidays are freaking ridiculous. And god help us when they decide that they weren't woke enough and add Lunar New Year and Chuseok in the next go-round of calendar votes.

Once again, random people on the Internet can come up with a better school calendar than all of the lauded professional FCPS staff and the idiotic School Board.

No, because that random person didn’t even know about the state law that requires schools to be closed the Friday before Labor Day. All we have here are armchair experts who know nothing.

Nonsense. Most of us knew about the law and most of us can come up with better calendars.

To be fair, FCPS could also come up with a better calendar if the SB had not forced them to add all the religious days.

These are the major issues:
All the religious holidays
And being married to 180 days rather than 990 hours.

Major issues:
Professional days
Religious holidays
Veterans Day

You forgot some major issues:
Two week christmas break
Winter break tied to Christmas
Spring break tied to Easter

Winter break will always be tied to Xmas in a country where a huge huge majority celebrates Xmas. Pretending anything else is ridiculous.
FCPS was perfectly willing to divorce spring break from Easter - but unless the other districts shift and follow us we have a real operational problem with staffing.
They need flexibility on two weeks for Xmas. Sometimes it makes sense and some times not.

Too damn bad. If including other religions’ holidays are ridiculous and they need to be “axed,” no problem, just as long as school attendance is compulsory on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

It would be an insurmountable operations issue. Are you seriously that dense?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The calendar for next year is decent.

2024-25 and 2025-26 are a huge mess!

I agree. Next year's calendar is just fine and I like the tweaks that Superintendent Reid made. But it doesn't work as well in the following years, especially 25-26.

They could have easily come up with this 2023-24 calendar in October and saved a lot of arguing and time wasted on surveys. It's what they were always going to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The calendar is basically what we have now but they majorly screwed up with the teacher workdays. The "fixed" the calendar at the expense of the teachers. This is what they always do. We bear the burden of all their bad decisions.

Teachers don't need 3 or 4 workdays at the end of the year. There's nothing to do. I need the work days DURING the school year. You know...when I have work to do. We can't use those work days for planning for next year b/c a lot of us don't know what we're teaching next year. We can't use them for our online trainings (I think the estimate is that it's about two days worth of watching videos for the yearly mandatory trainings) because they don't count for next year unless done after July 1. We can't use them to grade papers, write IEPs, write narratives, write goals, update gradebooks, mark progress, etc because...we have no students at that point and the year is over. All of that's been done already. So the only thing left is for us to sit in more useless PD that no one asked for or needs. We need unencumbered work time DURING the school year. Period. And the school board is oblivious to that because most of them have never taught a day in their lives.

This relentless crusade for more 5 days weeks is exactly what another poster said...a direct response to the addition of the religious holidays. The SB needs to man up and just call a tell these parents tough crap. The religious days were added. It is was it is. And the work days DURING the year are needed as well. They should have balanced those out as best they could while not short changing either. But instead, we get this mess. The fact that there were so many no votes + reluctant yeses should have been clue #1 that there was still work to be done.

Nonsense. It's the BS religious holidays that need to go, not the TWDs. Ax Diwali, YK, Eid and RH. Eliminate the extra Labor Day Friday, and only keep the Monday, and we're good. Then you can add back the TWDs.

These religious holidays are freaking ridiculous. And god help us when they decide that they weren't woke enough and add Lunar New Year and Chuseok in the next go-round of calendar votes.

Once again, random people on the Internet can come up with a better school calendar than all of the lauded professional FCPS staff and the idiotic School Board.

No, because that random person didn’t even know about the state law that requires schools to be closed the Friday before Labor Day. All we have here are armchair experts who know nothing.

Nonsense. Most of us knew about the law and most of us can come up with better calendars.

To be fair, FCPS could also come up with a better calendar if the SB had not forced them to add all the religious days.

These are the major issues:
All the religious holidays
And being married to 180 days rather than 990 hours.

Major issues:
Professional days
Religious holidays
Veterans Day

You forgot some major issues:
Two week christmas break
Winter break tied to Christmas
Spring break tied to Easter

Winter break will always be tied to Xmas in a country where a huge huge majority celebrates Xmas. Pretending anything else is ridiculous.
FCPS was perfectly willing to divorce spring break from Easter - but unless the other districts shift and follow us we have a real operational problem with staffing.
They need flexibility on two weeks for Xmas. Sometimes it makes sense and some times not.

Too damn bad. If including other religions’ holidays are ridiculous and they need to be “axed,” no problem, just as long as school attendance is compulsory on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

It would be an insurmountable operations issue. Are you seriously that dense?

+1
And if any of the religious holidays can prove an insurmountable operations issue for student attendance and/or staffing then those two would be merited as holidays. But they can’t because they are not. Instead they were just added because a small minority want them off and the SB was like “ok!”

[Anonymous]

^ too and two

[Anonymous]

I am shocked at the number of teacher work days. I am new to the county and my parents were both teachers. Never had teacher work days. Teachers, has the profession changed so much that this is necessary?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am shocked at the number of teacher work days. I am new to the county and my parents were both teachers. Never had teacher work days. Teachers, has the profession changed so much that this is necessary?

It’s not teacher work days. In reality, it’s meeting and useless PD. The calendar infers these days are for teachers to plan, work on progress reports, etc. The truth, many teachers have to plan and lead meetings and PDs because the county designates these days as such. It’s so
wasteful.

[Anonymous]

They should follow the federal govt and that's it
If the federal government decides to dimwali or Kwanzaa then so be it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The religious holiday "problem" is helped the next two school years by many of them falling on weekends. In the 23-24 calendar there are only two stand-alone religious holidays:

Yom Kippur 9/25
Eid al Fitr 4/10

In the 24-25 calendar there are four, but two of them are paired with quarter-ends, so again, only two "random" days off.

Rosh Hashanah 10/3
Diwali 11/1
Lunar New Year 1/29 (TW, combined with Q2 end)
Eid al Fitr 3/31 (combined with Q3 end)

The problem comes in the 25-26 calendar when a bunch of them come during the school year. I'm sure it would be completely insensitive, but I wonder if they could gather a religious contingent to pick one between Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur and one of the Eids. Or just look at the absentee data from the past.

Rosh Hashanah 9/23
Yom Kippur 10/2
Diwali 10/21
Lunar New Year 2/17 (TW)
Eid-al-Fitr 3/20
Orthodox Good Friday (TW)
Eid-al-Adha

Or get rid of all of them since this is a public, secular school system.

Any school board candidate who will advocate for getting rid of these absurd days off of school has my vote.

This!! 1000% agree. It is getting out of hand.

Dear school board,
There is no pleasing these people. They are probably the same ones who asked for a three year calendar to plan vacations. They are youngkin trolls looking for ANY angle (including the calendar) too trumpet about voting out the school board. There are more sane people and parents in the county that outnumber these fools. Please don't listen.

Thanks,

Most People

Huh? I’m a lifelong Dem. Never voted R in my life. I am voting for any R to replace this school board, though. Will be a first for me.
And I am far from alone. Most of my D friends hate the religion days off. I think the out of touch folks are you all who support endless four day weeks

Huh? I don't care one way or another about the days off. If you think making the school board R so charters and vouchers can be approved is fixing the issue, you are being shortsighted and are unable to control you anger over 5 days off. You are also playing right into Republican's hands. It's 5 days. You can handle it, your kids can handle it.