Every year MCPS gives students two major breaks throughout the school year, winter break and spring break. They also give one-day holidays for celebrations such as Memorial Day and Labor Day. Each year MCPS tries to get in about 180 instructional days, and if the school gets canceled too often because of events such as snow days, MCPS sometimes extends the school year a couple of days.
Students feel like they need extra time off from school during the year because of how much work they do when school is in session. And while some time off after the winter break and before spring break would be nice, it’s best for MCPS to keep the breaks the way they are.

If MCPS added another long break, then they would have to extend school for another week so that they could meet their 180 days of school. This would mean that we would get a week taken off from our summer vacation in order to get another break from school.

Junior Brett Halpern does not want any time taken away from his summer break and is against the extra off time between winter and spring breaks. “I feel like we already get enough days off from school during the year and I would way rather just have a longer summer break, getting school over with instead of having an extra week or two is ideal for me,” Halpern said.

Students may have trips planned that might get messed up if MCPS pushed back the start of summer vacation. Junior Sam Gross goes to Camp Echo for about eight weeks every summer and said the school year getting extended would hurt him. “Adding an extra break would just mean less summer vacation, which I don’t like because I spend almost the whole summer at camp and if the school year got extended I could possibly miss some camp, which I don’t want to happen,” Gross said.

MCPS gets released from school late compared to other public schools across the nation. While MCPS gets out of school around the middle of June every year, lots of public school systems let their students out in early June and sometimes even during May.

Junior Aditya Kumar wants school to end as early as possible and would not be happy if the school year got extended. “MCPS already lets us out of school late compared to many other schools and I don’t want them to add another break during the year to make the school year longer than it already is,” Kumar said.

While an extra break would be nice during the school year, a lot of students would be wishing that they didn’t get another break when their summer vacation is shortened.