Reply to How DO we get the calendar changed?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][twitter][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

What's wrong with the calendar?  It's good to have more days off to give both families and teachers a breather from the miserable daily grind.  As a parent, I don't understand why parents of older kids who do not need babysitting (I get it when parents need daycare) want more school days.

My other concern is teachers unavailability to timely grade tests/assignments and post for parental review as is.  Even with all the days dedicated to having teachers catch up on this work, they don't have ability to do this already, grades can be lagging weeks, which makes it difficult for the parents to assess when their child needs help.  There is already little to no communications between schools/teachers and parents when kids aren't doing well or fail before things get worse  (due to delayed posting of progress) that it's impossible to catch up or do anything.  So, no, I don't want more schools days, more assignments, more prolonged busy work for my kids and myself as a working parent. I want to also have more days for kids to catch up on assignments, on sleep, or to simply decompress, hang out with friends beyond organized activities, etc.

I get it that a lot of parents want longer or around-the-year school situation where kids are out of their hair daily, but this also heavily penalizes families who do not need this and don't want their kids to be punished for absences.

And for this whole thing with more days of school to work, we seriously need to have more teachers, fewer kids per class, to allow teacher to spend time to grade, assess who needs help, provide help to the kids who fail or underperform, provide extra challenges for kids who overachieve and are bored, etc. have ability to contact parents when needed, etc. [/quote]

You misunderstand. Many parents want kids in schools 5 days a week because all of these 3 or 4 day weeks extend the school year and make summer break shorter. [/quote]

Exactly. A longer summer provides opportunities for high achieving high school students to do the summer enrichment programs and still start practice for fall sports and have some downtime. A Tuesday at home in Chantilly is a waste compared to a week in New Haven.[/quote]

Ok, for the 1% the longer summer break is better.  For everyone else, there is significant learning loss over the summer.[/quote]

It’s way more than “the 1%”. Its every student with any value or interest outside the limits of FCPS offering. For example:

1. International students for whom the summer is the only opportunity to see family/immerse in language
2. Serious athletes especially in non-school programs like ballet and ice skating
3. Serious musicians doing summer conservatory programs
4. Families who send their kids to religiously affiliated camps — this is a big deal for a lot of Jewish families in the NE

And I don’t dispute that there may be learning loss. Parents can make a choice to send their kids to summer school if learning loss is their #1 concern. But for many, many Fairfax families, learning loss is an acceptable tradeoff to meet the needs that aren’t met in school . [/quote]

Those are wants vs needs[/quote]

There’s no “need” to be off on a random March Tuesday in order to limit families summer activities. Kids who need more school in the summer can sign up for summer school, but most kids don’t need it. [/quote]

Gosh, it must be hard to be you. All that free summer time and money to spend on your kids lessons, camps and vacations, yet you are still miserable because the world isn’t meeting your perceived “needs.”[/quote]

Look, if your kid is so significantly behind that they need a shorter summer to stay on track, I’m sympathetic. That must be hard. But most families have things they prioritize outside school— language, arts, sports, culture, even just family time. Public school cannot, and isn’t intended to, replace those things. [/quote]

DP. I like having our outside priorities year-round, not crammed into summer months.

I’d much rather have a shorter summer and have more extended breaks spread throughout the school year.

My kid can still have her summer job, maybe lasting 7 weeks instead of 9. And then we can have a family vacation in October or February, when we don’t have to take her out of her job just to travel during the crowded summer months.

[b][/b]You, PP, don’t speak for all of us.[b] Bring on the shorter summer! [/quote]

You don’t speak for all of us either. Some us want a longer summer and fewer disrupted weeks during the school year. [/quote]

Great! So we agree.

So let’s stop with the “most people feel…” this and the “all high schoolers need…” that.

No solution is going to make everybody happy because we are all invested in our own interests, like the poster who keeps bringing up prestigious summer internships that impact like .003% of high schoolers.

[/quote]

Most people do want long summers. Thats why there was such outcry this year, including from teachers. Absolutely no one got up and said 25-26 was a good calendar for students or families. [/quote]

Look… the loudest voices don’t always represent the bigger group.

And my point remains. No solution is going to please everybody because most people are fixated on their own interests.

I posted above about summer brain drain and how much time is wasted every school year reviewing the prior year’s material. I was met with comments about vacations and swim team, etc.

Let’s not pretend that people’s interests represent what’s best for the majority of students. It’s what’s best for them: their kids, their schedules, their preferences. [/quote]

Summer swim quite literally changed my life. It’s how I fell in love with the sport and got a full ride to a very good university. The year round swim teams cannot replicate the magic of summer league. It’s hard to explain if you aren’t familiar with it. I am sure that other experiences that kids have over a 8 or 9 week summer are equally formative… 6 week sleep away camps being just one example. It would be a real shame to dramatically modify or get rid of these things just so kids can sit in public school buildings most of the year. And no, you can’t recreate a lot of these opportunities during a 5 week summer or shorter breaks throughout the year.

It feels like people who don’t have the means to create a good summer for their children want to get rid of it for everyone else, so they don’t have to feel bad. [/quote]

What percentage of kids participate in summer swim and 6-week long camps? We have summer swim at our pool and the other neighborhood pool, less than half the kids participate and there are a lot of kids in the neighborhood that don’t belong to either pool. Setting the summer schedule around activities for families that are wealthy enough to afford them is ridiculous. Every few kids attend 6 weeks of sleep away summer camp or even 4 weeks of sleep away camp. I would be surprised if more then 1/4 of the kids in FCPS attend 2 weeks of sleep away camp.

There are specialized programs for HS that are not 7-9 weeks long. Students can get a job for 7 weeks in summer if they want to.

I can talk about the magic that is Scout camp, which I loved as a kid (Girl Scouts) and that my son loves now (Scouting America). I am not pushing to change the summer schedule because the high adventure camps would be better in early June then the end of June, although they would be. Why? Because a small percentage of the population has any type of interest in it.

There are some good reasons to not do year round school, although I think it would be great, but summer swim and specialized programs that a small percentage of HS kids participate in should not be on that list. [/quote]

This current schedule conflicts with a significant percentage of university programs, which large numbers of FCPS high school students attend.

A year round school would conflict with nearly ALL summer programs for high school students, including prestigious Virginia programs like Governor's school, which uses college campuses and dorms across the Commonwealth so the schedule is based on university schedules, not the whims and poor scheduling of a random northern Virginia school district. It conflucts with prestigious Girls State and Boys State

The students could not attend prestigious national programs, such as the summer programs for military service academies, or prestigious music and theater programs at the leading conservatories.  All of these work around university schedules, not random northern Virginia school districts that can't create a normal schedule that gives students 5 day weeks and a normal summer break.

Heck, my kid wanted to attend a basic summer program in the major they wanted at their #1 choice university last summer.  It was not a prestigious program, just a regular old college summer program.  They could not apply because the program was in June and FCPS was still in school for half of it.  So we looked at their #2 and #3  school.  Same scheduling issue.  Some good friends attended regular university programs that started a little later.  These would conflict with the year round school calendar that Loudoun is proposing.  Year round school shuts all of the high school students out of almost all of the university summer programs, the prestigious ones for sure, but also the basic university summer programs.

AP exams end mid May.   The high school curriculum for a huge majority of students ends when AP exams are over.

FCPS already has a full month of no learning for high school students, who by the way don't need free babysitting.  Schools should end by Memorial Day, period.  Extending the school year by 2 days so FCPS can proclaim they gave Eid off, and another day so they can say they gave Junteenth off is stupid performative pandering.

Year round school is even stupider.[/quote]

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