The most stressful month of school isn’t January, with all it’s finals, or May, with all of its AP tests – it’s March, the one month per each school year where students have no days off. The period of school without break extends from the end of midwinter break in February to the start of Spring Break in the middle of April, a full 7 weeks without even a three day weekend. Why do we get a week-long break in February, but not in March? It’s a seemingly unsolvable situation, because if we were to just add a week-long break in March, school would not only continue until the start of July, but we’d have one less week to prepare for AP tests. However, the problem isn’t completely without an answer:
What if, instead of having these random breaks scattered throughout the year, we had a more normalized schedule? Instead of 1 two-week winter break, 2 one-week breaks in the spring, 1 ten-week summer break, and a variety of three day weekends, we could make each month approximately the same. The school year would start in the third week of July and take off one week in each consecutive month until May, when summer break started.
Summer break would last for 7 weeks and winter break, midwinter break, and spring break would all be conserved. With this plan, highlighted on both sides of the page, we would take one week breaks for 11 months and take off all of July for a total of 36 weeks, or 180 days. The longest stretch of school would be the final 5 weeks of school, and with ¼ of each month off, the odds of students missing classes for illness or travel would reduce considerably. At the same time, students would have one full week a month to complete any projects assigned to them, and they’d be at less risk of forgetting information over an extremely long break.
Now, this schedule might sound a bit extreme. School starting in late July and not ending until late May? What happened to a relaxing summer break? What you have to remember when you’re considering this is that, with the exception of July (which is completely off), you get one full week of school off each month. One. Full. Week.