WOODBURY- With holidays coming up, everyone’s mind is focused on the countdown to break rather than school work itself, and most Nonnewaug students feel as though the holiday breaks are too short.
The amount of days that the district provides for breaks is unfair and not enough to please the students. For example, winter break: winter break is nine and a half days. We leave school the day before Christmas Eve and go back the morning after New Years Day. This makes it hard to celebrate with family, especially if they are not local.
Holiday breaks are predominantly used to celebrate the holiday with family and friends, but they also give students the chance to relax and unwind. I think that if we had a longer break, it would be more enjoyable for all students of Nonnewaug.
Many students share a similar viewpoint on this. Freshman Harper Vendt spends most of the days during holiday break with her family–both locally and internationally.
“I think we deserve for them [breaks] to be longer,” Vendt says. “We deserve a break from school and they don’t give us very long breaks. If we had longer breaks I’d definitely be able to do more, like see my family and friends for a longer time.”
Although students hold this opinion strongly, a teacher’s viewpoint, however, may be different.
“To have a longer break, especially a longer Christmas break is tough because in December we have a lot of kids that go away for break,” says Deborah Flaherty, a Nonnewaug coach of 3 sports. “Whether it’s to go visit family for the holidays, or they’re going on cruises and what not and so it’s very early in the beginning of the indoor season, so it disrupts the baseline training process that we need to get kids in shape before they start competing. When they don’t have time for that baseline training, that’s what leads to injuries.”
Personally, if we had a longer break, I would find myself in a happier state. I would have more free time to spend with my family, those who I don’t see much, and also a break from all the stress in school.
Although we don’t have long holiday breaks at Nonnewaug, other schools do. Private schools like Taft, Hotchkiss, etc. all have longer breaks. Many people who attend a private school board there because they are from a different country. They are given longer holiday breaks so they have time to travel internationally to visit their families.
People from all different schools have families from all over, including people who go to Nonnewaug, so why don’t we get longer breaks too?
Sophomore Jillian Buska also agrees that breaks should be longer than they are.
“I think holiday breaks should be longer because I like to celebrate with my family and I feel like I don’t have a lot of time to do that,” Bushka says, “especially if people are traveling to see their family. If I had more time off, I would be able to spend a lot more time with family and friends, I would be able to enjoy it more.”
I know that when holiday breaks come I’m so relieved and don’t have to stress about school, the longer breaks are the longer the stress isn’t there.
However, Spanish teacher Karen Sandor believes that longer breaks would have both a positive and negative effect
“I think that longer breaks for holidays would affect students when they get back,” Sandor says. “It’s always hard for students to come back and then return to what we were learning about before break. But at the same time I think it’s very healthy for them because having long breaks gives you time to recover and catch up on work. So in my opinion and with my experiences, breaks longer than a week are hard to come back to.”
This year, the break is a little longer than usual, but it would be nice to extend it every year moving forward.
