Spring break is coming up soon, and it’s only 1 week long. While many people appreciate this break from school, it feels much too short in my opinion.
Spring break is the one week school break which marks the end of the third quarter. I believe that spring break is too short. Despite giving students a break before the last section of the quarter because of the imbalance of the break lengths for all seasons. While summer break can be around 8-10 weeks, spring break is only one – and there’s no fall break to even speak of. I dislike the fact that there isn’t any fall break and I believe there should be some time set aside during the fall to enjoy the weather.
If it were up to me, I’d choose to shorten summer break and use a similar calendar as the single track year round school program. The single track program at year round schools is where the large summer break is greatly reduced and the time gained from reducing summer break is divided into many smaller breaks throughout the year. The main goal of this program is to ensure that students have minimalized learning loss from the large summer break and have extra time for their extracurricular activities and hobbies outside of school.
Other benefits of single track year round schooling include reducing teacher and student burnout, increased time for studying, and maximizing tutoring help while in school.
While there are some downsides to year round schooling such as disruption to schedules, childcare access during short two week long vacations, and there is not much research showing increases in literacy under this schedule. While literacy is only one thing, many believe that changing to year round schooling is unnecessary and isn’t worth the effort and disruption of people’s schedules.
In my opinion, all schools should have around three weeks of break each season so we can enjoy the weather of all seasons and we won’t have a huge learning loss during summer. Summer break is too long and the weather is too hot to enjoy and it has become detrimental to learning due to the large amount of learning loss found by studies from students learning very little for the three straight months of summer break.
In the past I have struggled remembering things after a long summer break and so have many of my friends over the years. Ultimately, I think while summer break is enjoyable and is long enough, the time should be allocated to spring break and others because it needs to be longer and a fall break should be created to lessen the learning loss during summer and give students time to enjoy all seasons.