INCREASING THE NUMBER OF "HOLIDAYS":

 

In an endeavor to shake things up, one of the ways "education reformers" have messed with public schools is by changing increments of time.

The school year used to begin after Labor Day.  It ended before Memorial Day.  If it went past Memorial Day in Texas, no one cared because Texans didn't celebrate Memorial Day as that was a Yankee holiday!  When the Yankees started moving to Texas, that changed.  They wanted the day off.  Before the Yankees got here, Memorial Day was "Splash Day" at the local pool, watering hole or beach. Memorial Day is now a celebration of the lives of ALL military personnel who have died in the service of their country.  It originally only honored Union Soldiers from the Civil War--thus the disinterest in the South.

But I digress.  A school year beginning and ending on the aforementioned days, seemed to suffice, and the education afforded in that time period worked just fine. 

The school district pundits will always suggest that "we are no longer a farm community" implying that we were somehow backwards when we started school after Labor Day.  Not so! They are putting the cart before the horse.  And they are lying, once again.  Mostly the crop in Texas is cotton, and cotton doesn't get picked in most places until well after Labor Day.  So the excuse that in the past (which we must totally reject as backwards and unworthy) they had to wait until the crops were in before school could begin is bogus. "They" would also claim that the Hispanic population would not show up before Labor Day either. That's not true either and is racist to say.

The powers that be just want to have control of our children for as long as they can--that's why they want to start school at the beginning of August! Teachers also want the extra money of working another month during the school year.

In the last twenty years they tried to get "Year Around Schools" to fly, but that didn't go over so well.  Locally when neighboring Cy Fair ISD started down this path, their good teachers left in droves and  came to KISD.  That put an end to that idea in that school district right away. No one wants their child to miss out on summer vacations.  That period of time is too embedded in our psyches as a favorite time of childhood, and we don't want our children to miss having it too. If one tries to argue this point with a "progressive" the argument will turn to "how the world has changed, how it would be 'better' if students' holidays reflected those of their parents, and how the wicked tourist industry is controlling our lives by lobbying against the Year Round School concept!"  I say Hooray for the Tourist Industry.  Thank God someone still has some sense! 

But they have other means of getting their way on this issue and that is because it's a hidden agenda:  these revolutionary progressives never give up for they would REALLY like to have your child from the womb to the tomb, as they say--after all they are your "partners" in the rearing of your mutual child!

As it is, they have encroached on our summers far too much.  I think part of it too, as I said previously, is that the teachers' unions simply wanted more time for their teachers to work, thus allowing them to make more money. Also they have abandoned the idea of making summer a time for teachers to go back to college to get another degree or to supplement the knowledge that they already have with more!

At the current time in Texas, the school year is 180 days.  Some of those days are utilized by the teachers without students in attendance.  180 days is a lot of days, but it is what is needed to teach the academics that a student  needs to cover in a school year.

Another problem that has appeared is how to split the school year so that it is equal.  It never seemed to me, once they did away with half grades, that it was necessary to "finish" certain subjects by Christmas, but that's what they try to claim to justify what they do.  Instead of bumping back the start of the year, why couldn't they have just altered the course work to fit the shorter time in the fall and the longer time in the spring.  Half year courses got in the way of that logic.

In Katy ISD, the semester started ending before Christmas because of some students at Taylor High School.  My son was the Student Council president, and some of his friends approached him with the idea of ending the semester before Christmas so that they didn't have to come back after two weeks off and take finals. He asked me how to find out how they could get that idea accomplished, and I suggested that they come before the Board and ask.  The Board liked the idea and so that's what they did. 

Of course what I didn't realize was that this played into the administrators'  hands quite nicely.  It gave them another excuse to lengthen the school year!

Before long ALL the Texas school districts followed suit.

The next thing that happened was the addition of extra holidays.  This action happened once the administrators realized they could make more money (or justify what they were making already) by lengthening the time they "worked."  Once they started working all summer, they felt justified in seeking more holidays during the year.  It was an elitist attitude, but hey!  Therefore, we have a week at Thanksgiving instead of just Friday AFTER Thanksgiving.  We have sometimes almost three weeks at Christmas.  (And don't even get me started on the "winter holiday" junk.  That's just a liberal's way of messing with the season.  If people don't celebrate Christmas, why do we let them have those days off?  Answer: because we call it a "winter holiday" instead!)

Easter gets both Good Friday and Easter Monday added as holidays, but I doubt anyone remembers why Monday after Easter is a sacred holiday.   Call it an administrator's "day off" instead. It's also interesting that the public schools admit to these holidays but are quick to use them as make up days for bad weather in the fall or winter.

And then there's Spring Break.  That's a relatively new invention.  It probably started in the 1980's.  We didn't have Spring Break in the 1970's.  Now I'm hearing about "Fall Break." KISD used to let the students off for the Rodeo Parade in "downtown" Katy.  It was a fun thing to do.  Then they attached Spring Break to the day and no one cared about the Rodeo Parade anymore.  Do they even still have one?

Do you see the trend here?  If they can't get "Year Around Schools," they'll just pick at us with meaningless holidays until we have year around schools anyway because the law says students and their teachers have to be in schools for 180 days.  So there you have it!