Students Prepare for Shorter School Holiday Vacations

The amount of holiday vacation days this year has been shortened compared to vacations from past years due to various factors.

Some students and staff have noticed and have given both positive and negative feedback, wondering the cause.

There are many factors that go into creating the school calendar, and assistant superintendent Robert Bryson knows the schedule creation process well.

“The committee gets together and meets multiple times in the course of several months and drafts a working 2-year cycle calendar,” Bryson said,”…the committee is a group made up of parents, students, teachers, administrators [and] representatives of each of the buildings.”

Schedule creation can be challenging, according to Bryson.                                                                                                                                                   “The dynamic can be compared to dominoes,” Bryson said because if one event has been messed with, it will affect future events.                   “The later we start, that affects a larger portion of the school, but athletics and band starts the first week of August. The longer you push it, the higher the possibility that the school, athletics and band go into June or mid-June. There is also the factor of snow days that then put those days at the end of the year.”

One positive opinion about this year’s calendar is about how healthy the communication is between students and staff now that there are less breaks that interrupt the average week.

Senior, student council president Megan Stiffler hopes that the levels of communication will continue to improve.

“I wish that [some teachers] would have more communication and be able to share more information with us,” Stiffler said.

Another perspective is how people feel with the decision to shorten the holidays’ lengths because of the fact that the 23 of November is different from previous years.

“We had [it] off every single school year, and it’s kind of weird that we have such a short [fall] break,” Stiffler said about Nov. 23.

Less days off means spending less time with people that students and staff care about and changing travel plans accordingly.

“I know for other people that they were [planning to go] on vacation to spend time with their family, and now they have to make adjustments due to more days of school and less days off for the holidays,” Stiffler said.

Winter break 2021’s length changes will be slight.

The difference from the 2020-2021 school year winter break and the 2021- 2022 school year winter break is that in 2020-2021 school winter break students had off Jan. 1 as well since it fell on a school day. This year Jan. 1 lands on a Sunday.

Spring break 2022 has no major length changes.

Even though for spring break the amount of days students would have off did not change, the month for spring break did change from March 2021 to April 2022.