Reply to How DO we get the calendar changed?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]
FCCPS has something like 2700 students in the entire district. The city is 2 square miles and its population is 70% white. Surely you can see why a school with 177,000 students and majority minority demographics might balance cultural observances differently. [/quote]

What data support FCPS needing to handle cultural observances differently? Since when did planning a school calendar become an exercise in making everyone feel good? The only reason I can think of is for school board members to pander to certain groups whose votes they want when they go to run for office.

I can't get over the week of April 6. Off that Monday AND Friday, right after spring break? For Easter Monday? Come on. I am a cradle Catholic who grew up in an area with a ton of Catholics from various countries, and we never celebrated that. The number of people who do in FCPS must be super tiny.[/quote]

Exactly PP. If FCPS expects parents to juggle a dozen competing priorities like PP said above, maybe Gatehouse, the school board, and the unions could try using some AND statements themselves.

How about teachers get paid properly AND get real planning time that isn’t on their own dime AND ES kids get an actual education without the constant chaos?

And while they’re at it, maybe take a breath on the endless computer everything and teach with pencils AND paper again. AND de‑prioritize the standardized computer testing in ES and stop being so obsessive about the SOLs.

It’s not that complicated. They’re the ones telling us to hold multiple truths at once - they can try it too.
[/quote]

It is complicated. The state has to do SOL testing thanks to No Child Left Behind which was passed under Bush. Results are tied to federal funding. And the tests are now all on the computer so teachers prep the kids for it by instructing and testing…on the computer. Teachers are getting real planning time this year with all the teacher workdays - and parents are having a fit. [/quote]

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