The school year is more than 10 months for staff and 2025-26 is extra long for students-Must be shortened

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe the 2025-2026 calendar will be changed.

They are not going to shorten the school year. They would need to remove either the federal holidays or the new religious days or shorten the Winter Break and I don't see them doing any of that. The only one I potentially see them doing is removing the federal holidays. Losing the new religious holidays will cause a stink with the various religions and shortening winter break will piss off the people who take a month at that time of year to travel to Asia/SE Asia visit family and the parents who want two weeks in Europe or skiing.

If religious holiday must be kept as days off for all students, then schedule Teacher work days (professional development or planning days) on religious holidays and allow specific teachers to take off religious holiday on Teacher workdays if relevant to their religion.

-Teacher

Teacher here. They are doing that for some of them that year - Lunar New Year and Orthodox Good Friday. But there are way too many Professional Workdays - we don't need 10 throughout the year.

I would be thrilled if our workdays were all actually work days, not professional development days.

I get nothing out of the PD days. They do not help me to be a better teacher, they do nothing positive to impact instruction in my classroom, do not help me to better understand my students or their families, and usually piss off me and most of my colleagues.

We have PD on how to better run meetings with other teachers. We don't need that. No teacher I know cares a lick about meeting protocol. We care about teaching and our students. We don't care if every team meeting has a unique opening grounding question. Why are we wasting time learning how to write icebreakers? Such a waste of time.

We have PD during which the facilitators always say "I invite you to read over our goals and working agreements" before they remind us how to run a meeting. Waste of time. It is infantilizing and demeaning and not at all helpful to us doing our jobs.

In a 90 minute PD, 45 minutes is spent on these reminders of how to run meetings. Why? We aren't in the business of meeting. We want to teach. If the PD actually helped us be more effective in our classrooms, we'd probably be more receptive to it. But it's all about how to run meetings. It's a waste of time. The people who design these PD sessions haven't stepped foot in a classroom in years if not decades so they are clueless about what effective PD looks like. But they don't ask the people who are working with children everyday because our opinions and feedback don't matter.

If we ran our classrooms the way our PD is run, students would receive no more than 2 hours of actual instruction per day. The rest of the time would be us saying ridiculous things like "I invite you to read over our class rules for the 350th time this school year... Now I want you all to share your answer to 'if you were to travel to a new place, blindfolded, what would you need to know?'... Now that we've heard from all 30 students about what they'd want to know, let's review our class working agreements again... Great, now let's talk about our goals for today... Now that we've talked about our goals for the day, I invite you to read our class rules again... Thank you for engaging in that review. Now let's take out our folders... Wonderful. You've all followed me direction to take out your folders. Let's review our class working agreements again to discuss which working agreement you just followed..."

To be fair I'm pretty sure that some teachers actually do run class this way.

I'm thinking of you middle DC's second grade teacher.

Probably because teachers have essentially been told to do so. It's ridiculous.

Senior teachers ignore that advice and teach the way they know kids learn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:I prefer the longer school year.

me too

I prefer the longer school year as well. Actually, I wish our 180 days were spread out over the whole year with 3-week breaks in between the quarters and a 5-week break in the summer. That would be awesome!

Many local pools would probably shut down. They wouldn’t survive a 5 week summer financially. I know it seems frivolous to some, but many wouldn’t want that to happen.

They could just start recruiting college kids and international kids. I guarantee that local pools would find a way. I mean, they are open all summer long now even though HS kids are in school for half of June and half of August, right?

I wasn't thinking about the guard staff. I was thinking about how many people would choose to not pay for only 5 weeks of use.

When I was a kid in Texas, the local pools were open from the end of April to the end of Sept. Kids were in school until the end of May and then returned to school at the beginning of August. Families still bought pool passes because kids went to the pool after school and on weekends. At our pool in Fairfax, tons of kids go to the pool after school and on weekends when school is in session. I know you do not want to think so, but pool and school CAN coexist easily.

9 or 10 weeks is a far cry above 5 not to mention spending weeks in HOT SCHOOL BUSES!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Students YE date is June 11th 2025(2nd Wednesday)followed by staff development days.There are two Teacher work days the following week. But in past teachers weren’t “required” to be in school. As long as rooms were cleaned out, Grading could be finished and submitted from home. Is this just school dependent? I’m mainly referring to HS .

I wish we had a TW towards the end of the 4th quarter to be used for completing Progress Reports. They take a long time to complete.

ES Teacher

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students YE date is June 11th 2025(2nd Wednesday)followed by staff development days.There are two Teacher work days the following week. But in past teachers weren’t “required” to be in school. As long as rooms were cleaned out, Grading could be finished and submitted from home. Is this just school dependent? I’m mainly referring to HS .

I wish we had a TW towards the end of the 4th quarter to be used for completing Progress Reports. They take a long time to complete.

ES Teacher

Friday before or Tuesday after Memorial Day would be perfect. Eliminate 2 of 3 or 3 of 4 teacher days after last day of school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students YE date is June 11th 2025(2nd Wednesday)followed by staff development days.There are two Teacher work days the following week. But in past teachers weren’t “required” to be in school. As long as rooms were cleaned out, Grading could be finished and submitted from home. Is this just school dependent? I’m mainly referring to HS .

I wish we had a TW towards the end of the 4th quarter to be used for completing Progress Reports. They take a long time to complete.

ES Teacher

Friday before or Tuesday after Memorial Day would be perfect. Eliminate 2 of 3 or 3 of 4 teacher days after last day of school.

+1
So many hours spent at home working on figuring and entering grades and it’s double the other quarters because of the final grades that are additional. It’s also at a time of year when it seems there are extra EOY things that have to be completed.

[Anonymous]

The OPs dates are incorrect on the student calendar, the last day of school is the 2nd Wednesday(not 3rd) June 11 2025

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I prefer the longer school year.

me too

I prefer the longer school year as well. Actually, I wish our 180 days were spread out over the whole year with 3-week breaks in between the quarters and a 5-week break in the summer. That would be awesome!

Many local pools would probably shut down. They wouldn’t survive a 5 week summer financially. I know it seems frivolous to some, but many wouldn’t want that to happen.

They could just start recruiting college kids and international kids. I guarantee that local pools would find a way. I mean, they are open all summer long now even though HS kids are in school for half of June and half of August, right?

I wasn't thinking about the guard staff. I was thinking about how many people would choose to not pay for only 5 weeks of use.

When I was a kid in Texas, the local pools were open from the end of April to the end of Sept. Kids were in school until the end of May and then returned to school at the beginning of August. Families still bought pool passes because kids went to the pool after school and on weekends. At our pool in Fairfax, tons of kids go to the pool after school and on weekends when school is in session. I know you do not want to think so, but pool and school CAN coexist easily.

9 or 10 weeks is a far cry above 5 not to mention spending weeks in HOT SCHOOL BUSES!

Yeah, you must not be from the south. You want hot school buses? Try riding in one on a mid-August afternoon in Houston, TX.

[Anonymous]

https://www.fcps.edu/system/files/2025-2026-standard-school-year-calendar.pdf

Entire school system is closed for Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha? What are these holidays and what are 180k students supposed to do on these days?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.fcps.edu/system/files/2025-2026-standard-school-year-calendar.pdf

Entire school system is closed for Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha? What are these holidays and what are 180k students supposed to do on these days?

Whatever the Muslim, Jewish and various other religions do on Christmas.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.fcps.edu/system/files/2025-2026-standard-school-year-calendar.pdf

Entire school system is closed for Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha? What are these holidays and what are 180k students supposed to do on these days?

Google is an amazing tool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students YE date is June 11th 2025(2nd Wednesday)followed by staff development days.There are two Teacher work days the following week. But in past teachers weren’t “required” to be in school. As long as rooms were cleaned out, Grading could be finished and submitted from home. Is this just school dependent? I’m mainly referring to HS .

I wish we had a TW towards the end of the 4th quarter to be used for completing Progress Reports. They take a long time to complete.

ES Teacher

Friday before or Tuesday after Memorial Day would be perfect. Eliminate 2 of 3 or 3 of 4 teacher days after last day of school.

+1

YES! SOLs are over and the end of the year is in sight. Do the TWs/PD days around Memorial Day!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The OPs dates are incorrect on the student calendar, the last day of school is the 2nd Wednesday(not 3rd) June 11 2025

OP is looking at the calendar 2 years from now: SY25-26. The last day of school is June 17.

[Anonymous]

I work for APS, and am looking at FCPS's current calendar. They have TWO days off after Easter? And had TWO entire weeks off for Winter Break this year! We don't even have the Monday after Easter off. It's a full, regular school day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work for APS, and am looking at FCPS's current calendar. They have TWO days off after Easter? And had TWO entire weeks off for Winter Break this year! We don't even have the Monday after Easter off. It's a full, regular school day.

It’s the end of the quarter and as others have mentioned I use much of that time to complete and enter grades (Monday, since Tuesday is a Staff Dev day).

One day to do grades when they are due (~2 weeks before the last day) for the 4th quarter would be super helpful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work for APS, and am looking at FCPS's current calendar. They have TWO days off after Easter? And had TWO entire weeks off for Winter Break this year! We don't even have the Monday after Easter off. It's a full, regular school day.

As someone else said, it’s the end of the quarter. I’ve been teaching in FCPS for a long time and I don’t remember ever having this Monday as a workday - it’s just how the calendar fell this year and will be different next year because Spring Break always changes.