Reply to The response to MoCo's calendar change shows why the FCPS religious holidays will never go away

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "The response to MoCo's calendar change shows why the FCPS religious holidays will never go away"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can someone explain the “make it a teacher workday” request? Looking at the 2026-27 calendar, every TW/SP/SD day is placed at the end of a quarter except for Indigenous People Day. How is converting Student Holidays to TW going to improve the calendar? They’ll still need the planning days between quarters. The only benefit I see is that SACC would have to be open those days, but that would require paying them more, and the county has already proven they’d rather cut services than do that. [/quote]

Looking at this school year’s calendar I would make the following changes:

There isn’t much that can be done about the Election Day stuff so I guess that can remain a 4 day weekend, but I would dump all the quarter end 2 hour early releases. Or dump the 3 hour early releases for elementary, which absolutely should not have continued this school year.

School on Veterans Day like it always was in the past.

Move the staff development scheduled for Jan. 29 (Thurs) to the day before Thanksgiving. Move the QE date for Q2 to Jan. 29 and have it a regular school day, then Friday Jan. 30 a TW for grades.

April 10 SP day moved to May 26 (this is a TW day right now - combine the two as May 26 is not a QE). School as normal on April 10, could be an O day if they anticipate a lot of student absences for Orthodox Good Friday.

That gives us back 3 school days and we could end on June 12, a whole weekend earlier vs. the current June 17.

In these years where we have to have off mid week for every single religious/cultural holiday, I think tough decisions have to be made about even some of the federal holidays like Veterans and Columbus/Indigenous Peoples day. Fortunately next year’s calendar is a little more favorable as we get to start almost a full week later on August 24 vs. this year’s August 18. [/quote]
The 2025-26 calendar probably shouldn't be used as a model on how the school year could be improved. It is an abnormally bad calendar that has filler work days to fill gaps in holidays. Feb 17 and May 26 were entirely pointless. Sept 9 was a special election fluke. Oct 13, Nov 11, and Apr 10 were expendable. When you look at the 2026-27 calendar, we start a week later and there’s less fat to trim.

https://www.fcps.edu/system/files/forms/2025-04/2026-2027-standard-school-year-calendar.pdf[/quote]

Next year is less bananas because some of the religious holidays in the fall are on weekends.  That’s the only reason - luck.  I’m sure next time those holidays are on weekdays, we’ll be right back to this absurd calendar.

It would be very easy to model our calendar like those in the northeast - they start after Labor Day and end in the first half of June - and a lot of those districts have a week long break in February AND April!  Also, predominately Christian / catholic schools up north never tie spring break to Easter.

Or look across the river to DCPS! They don’t have every religious holiday under the sun and have a more reasonable start date. [/quote]
In my experience, Northeast schools go until the end of June. Never the first half. They do get a full week off for President’s Day, but their Spring Break is not consistent and rotates like ours does (although the point of reference isn’t always Holy Week. It could be the week after Easter or over Passover.) All in all, their school year is one week shorter than ours. [/quote]

The NE calendars tend not to have so many random one-off days scattered throughout the calendar.  Frankly, that’s my biggest problem with our calendar.  The fact that a five day week is the exception and not the rule. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics