Excuse my ranting
Ok, so this'll be long, and I'm sorry, but I just need to get this off my chest before I scream. So a week or so ago I wrote a story about how my local school board was considering altering the school calendar to something that was more akin to other local school districts and also more educationally beneficial to the children in the district. Because the calendar has been set up a certain way for the past 15-plus years, everyone lost their goddamned minds on Facebook. So a little backstory: a decade and a half ago, the school district decided to switch to a 9-week-on-2-week-off schedule, with 2 weeks of fall, spring, and Christmas break. It involved having one of the weeks in the fall and spring used for remediation--credit recovery and things like that--and the district was given some extra money specifically for remediation so that it could pay teachers for that extra week (extending their contracts, essentially). However, data over the decade or so it's been happening shows that students did not get the remediation they needed because they either didn't show up or didn't do the work they needed to get the recovery. THEN the district lost the money used for paying the teachers, so there was no more remediation happening during those breaks anyway, but because it was easier not to change the calendar back than to change it, they left things alone and people got used to the way it's been. SO! After a few months or spitballing ideas, one of the school board members (I'll call her Jane) came up with a calendar that combined several elements of some popular items, including a longer summer and thanksgiving break. It includes shortening the fall and spring breaks by three school days and having them start on a Thursday and continuing through the following week. Thanksgiving break would be a week long. The school year would not start until august 1 at the earliest, and would not continue past Memorial Day. So we post the story on Facebook and everybody collectively lost their shit. There's all kinds of comments from people botching about "oh I looove the two week breaks! They're so great for our family!" And "I'm a teacher and I don't mind the calendar the way it is" and shit like that Basically nobody is looking at the bigger picture: they're all focused on themselves. Some people even went so far as to say that the school board was doing this just to be controversial and just because Jane wanted to change things for herself and blah blah blah. Like, you guys, that is NOT how school boards operate. AT ALL. The school board doesn't make decisions based on what would serve THEM the best; they make decisions based in what would best serve THE DISTRICT. That's their whole point! And like, I could have done some better explaining in my article, but it was long and I was trying to fill like three pages on my own and I just needed to get it done. There was a lot more I could have put in there, but I just ran out of time, okay? But anyway, the point is that the school board was t proposing this calendar because it would be easier for them to take vacations with their families, They proposed this because it best educates ALL tullahoma students--not just yours. I'm so fucking sick of people complaining about things. And I knew they would, just because no one likes change. Funnily enough, when the board switched to the 9/2 calendar people bitched about that! So there's really no winning. It's just an adjustment. You'll get used to it. Stop whining.