Reply to How DO we get the calendar changed?

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "How DO we get the calendar changed? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Now the school board is floating the idea of removing Veterans Day and IP Day next year and shifting early release to Fridays. At this point, it feels like they’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Families have slogged through a year of chopped‑up weeks, pointless closures, and “professional days” that seem to appear out of thin air - and this is the grand solution?

Let’s be honest: this isn’t meaningful reform. It’s tokenism dressed up as “responsiveness,” a quick political talking point they can wave around while avoiding the real conversation about how dysfunctional the calendar has become. Scrapping two holidays and shuffling early release to Fridays doesn’t fix anything. It’s cosmetic, short‑term, and designed to look like action without actually requiring any.

If they want credibility, they need to stop playing calendar whack‑a‑mole and address the structural mess they’ve created. Families deserve a school year that isn’t a patchwork of interruptions. Students deserve instructional time that isn’t constantly carved up. And the board needs to stop pretending that these tiny, performative tweaks count as leadership.[/quote]

Yes, they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And also, there was a reason they moved the elementary early release days from Mondays to Wednesdays: Too many staff took the Mondays off. Do they not expect that same problem with Fridays?[/quote]

Stop the early release days all together.  Those days are a total waste.  Of the 4.5 hours - 1 hour is lunch and recess.  Between morning mtg and transitions it is about an hour of learning and that is if the teacher uses it to teach.  Not all do.  It is a joke of a day.

Our school does “family time”.  Which is a waste.  At least cancel recess and specials and actually teach something in the 4.5 hours they have.  Gah.[/quote]

It really depends on the teacher and school how effective the time is. My kid who is in full time AAP at the center school still learns a significant amount on those days. My kid’s teachers create a special schedule on early release days to minimize impact to instruction time. But it’s a wasted day for my 2nd grader at the base school. The teacher while very kind is not effective in general. It doesn’t matter if it’s a full day or early release. I blame the poor leadership at the base school. Getting rid of early release teacher prep time will not solve the problem at our base school and would actually make it worse. I support the teacher prep time. FCCPS has even more Wednesday early releases and it seems to work for them.[/quote]

FCCPS has made other trade-off like having religious holidays with school in session instead of having them off entirely. We can’t just take their early release schedule without looking at the other operational choices that make it palatable.[/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