Schools Are Closing Classrooms on Fridays. Parents Are Furious.

[entremet]

DETROIT — Caitlin Reynolds, a single mother, was happy that her son, L.J., was finally settled into fourth grade after a rocky experience last year with remote learning.

Then, on Wednesday, Nov. 17, an announcement: Detroit public schools would close its classrooms every Friday in December. There would be virtual school only.

On Friday, a follow-up announcement: School was also canceled starting that Monday, for the entire week of Thanksgiving. This time, there would be no online option.

"You need to take the kids back out again?" Ms. Reynolds said. "How is that not going to be harmful to these students?"

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School districts cited various reasons for the temporary closings, from a rise in Covid-19 cases to a need to thoroughly sanitize classrooms. But for many schools, the remote learning days — an option that did not exist before the pandemic — are a last-ditch effort to keep teachers from resigning. They are burned out, educators said, after a year of trying to help students through learning loss, and working overtime to make up for labor shortages.

Battles in the classroom — from mask mandates to debates over critical race theory — have also taken a toll, said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country's second-biggest teachers' union.

"What you hear from teachers is that it's been too much," she said. "And they're trying the best that they can."

These temporary closures, though, may only hamper relationships with parents at a moment when tensions in many districts are already high.

Because of school cancellations last academic year, Ms. Reynolds, who works at a University of Michigan research lab, had already run out of paid time off. Her mother was able to watch her fourth-grade son last Friday. But now she is scrambling to make sure someone else can be home with him every Friday this month — or lose hundreds of dollars from her paycheck.

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Key points:

• 2 years into the pandemic teachers are burned out
• Some districts are going remote only Fridays to help with this along with cleaning protocols for COVID
• The GOP sparked anti-CRT debates have also taken their toll.
• The virtual teaching infrastructure developed at the height of the pandemic has helped make this move possible.

I do think the last minute updates here were done poorly. Single and low income parents have fewer options to cope. If this was something that was adopted they should've given parents more runway to plan and coordinate childcare.

However, American education is a mess. Teachers are underpaid, overworked, blamed for everything. The pandemic really revealed that our society doesn't care for teachers, nurses, doctors, and so on.

Schools Are Closing Classrooms on Fridays. Parents Are Furious. (Published 2021)

Desperate to keep teachers, some districts have turned to remote teaching for one day a week — and sometimes more. Families have been left to find child care.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Disco Stu]

Good for teachers and fuck the GOP

 

[Ryuelli]

My mom has been an elementary school teacher for 25+ years. Teaching runs in the family; my great-grandpa was a teacher, my mom is a teacher, I'm a teacher, and my aunt is a teacher. She was planning on continuing to work for another few years before retiring, but I'll be extremely surprised if she's still in the classroom next year, she's close to being done.

She still loves the kids, but feels like more and more responsibilities are being thrust on teachers as positions are discontinued (some schools in our area don't even have dedicated school nurses or librarians, for example - they travel between schools) without a real increase of pay, parents are becoming more and more disrespectful and treat teachers as customer service representatives instead of educated professionals with bachelor and master degrees (not to say that treating customer service representatives like shit is acceptable either, but more in the "I'll continue to escalate this until until my child has the grade I want them to have" way), schools aren't really able to hold kids accountable for their actions due to how funding works (suspensions mean the kid isn't in the building, which means, at least here in Texas, that school is losing money). The list goes on and on.

I'm in my 7th teaching; 4 in Korea and 3 in the US, and my goal is to be out of the classroom in 2 years. I will be that 40-50% statistic that leaves the US classroom within 5 years of starting, but it's pretty clear to me that that happens for a reason. I still want to be in education, but I hope to transition to curriculum design or ed tech. The way I was treated in Korea by students, parents, and the system as a whole is night and day compared to here (although I will say I'm one of the rare ones that has a fantastic admin team).

 

[Post Reply]

...

However, American education is a mess. Teachers are underpaid, overworked, blamed for everything. The pandemic really revealed that our society doesn't care for teachers, nurses, doctors, and so on.

Click to shrink...

I mean, it wasn't exactly a secret before the pandemic

 

[modernlifeisANDY]

I've been teaching for fifteen years and I am really feeling it this year. I teach high school but I often feel like I am correcting middle school problems, and so the challenge has been adapting. I love my kids, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't looking to move out of the classroom. I've been considering moving to education technology for a while and this might be the year that finally breaks me.

 

[BuckRogers]

Education is a mess, and teachers bear the brunt of it, and being burnt out after this past year and a half makes complete sense (and that's without all the bullshit that preceded the pandemic)

The problem with the Detroit story is that they're leaving parents completely in the lurch with sudden closures. You can't make changes like that suddenly and just expect parents to cope, it completely fucks up work schedules and most of the time there's no way to find childcare in that kind of time frame.

 

[Dr. Monkey]

Yeah, doing it in loads of Michigan districts with little notice, and I'm sure that's hard for a lot of people, especially since our buses are also a mess and that's been another nightmare for working parents. But EVERYONE needs it. We need the breaks. We need the resources. We all need it.

 

[entremet]

I mean, it wasn't exactly a secret before the pandemic

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I'm aware unfortunately. I feel the pandemic really brought out our (America that is) ugliness to the max.

Education is a mess, and teachers bear the brunt of it, and being burnt out after this past year and a half makes complete sense (and that's without all the bullshit that preceded the pandemic)

The problem with the Detroit story is that they're leaving parents completely in the lurch with sudden closures. You can't make changes like that suddenly and just expect parents to cope, it completely fucks up work schedules and most of the time there's no way to find childcare in that kind of time frame.

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I agree, but it's not the teachers making these decisions.

 

[Ryuelli]

I've been teaching for fifteen years and I am really feeling it this year. I teach high school but I often feel like I am correcting middle school problems, and so the challenge has been adapting. I love my kids, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't looking to move out of the classroom. I've been considering moving to education technology for a while and this might be the year that finally breaks me.

Click to shrink...

I'm in an elementary and we're having the same issue. Our 5th graders are acting like 2nd graders (while simultaneously having the typical attitude problems that come with getting close to MS), our 2nd graders are acting like kindergartners, and we had a surprising amount of kindergartners that came to school this year not potty trained.

My nail-on-the-chalkboard issue this year is kids not understanding what an indoor voice is. They're constantly shouting across the room at each other...

 

[Dr. Monkey]

I've been teaching for fifteen years and I am really feeling it this year. I teach high school but I often feel like I am correcting middle school problems, and so the challenge has been adapting. I love my kids, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't looking to move out of the classroom. I've been considering moving to education technology for a while and this might be the year that finally breaks me.

Click to shrink...

You're not alone. I teach college and these last two years students have felt so behind. Always adapting. Always trying to make up for something. And what real tangible support systems are there for struggling students in college? Not many at my university, that's for damned sure.

 

[Cenauru]

Edit: nvm, misunderstood the thread

 

[Conkersbadfurday]

I'm in an elementary and we're having the same issue. Our 5th graders are acting like 2nd graders (while simultaneously having the typical attitude problems that come with getting close to MS), our 2nd graders are acting like kindergartners, and we had a surprising amount of kindergartners that came to school this year not potty trained.

My nail-on-the-chalkboard issue this year is kids not understanding what an indoor voice is. They're constantly shouting across the room at each other...

Click to shrink...

As a not-a-teacher, what do you think is causing some of this? Is it skipping basically a year and a half of in-person learning, or is this more of a parental issue that starts at home and just bleeds everywhere else?

I've always had a soft spot for teachers, because I hit a fork in the road and could have become one. I bet I am one in some parallel universe. Kinda glad I skipped it in this one though. It seems like absolute hell :\

 

[entremet]

It's becoming more and more obvious that school is just cheap daycare to some parents. The complaints I've seen from parents actually having to be with their kids is saddening, how are teachers not paid for the extra responsibilities of practically being parents to so many children on top of teaching them fundamentals in life?

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I do think this is more nuanced though.

The school and work model is decades old by now. So the pandemic disruptions were a whole new beast. Combine that with growing precarity, the growth of non-traditional family models, creates a lack of durability when things like in person schooling is not available.

What's interesting that the Paid Family provision in the Biden bill would cover this stuff. But this will likely be gutted or severely reduced in the Senate. Or may not be passed at all.

Employers basically call all the shots.

My issue is common decency. Many parents lash out on teachers. That's not productive.

 

[Blader]

I totally get and sympathize with teacher burnout — and that's not even just covid, it's the culmination of decades of thrusting the responsibility for raising thousands of kids beyond just teaching them the curriculum onto teachers — but the school admins handled this really poorly. You cannot just give parents a 48 hour heads up about cancellations like that. Lots of parents simply don't have alternatives for their kids during the day and you can't force them to come up with those options with so little notice.

I also worry about districts resorting to virtual learning as a crutch like this, given the documented and widespread learning loss over the past two years, particularly among poor and black and brown kids. Also, and maybe I'm totally off base and wrong here, but I had the impression that virtual learning was really shitty and burdensome for teachers too, so how does resorting to something like "virtual learning Fridays" help them?

 

[entremet]

I totally get and sympathize with teacher burnout — and that's not even just covid, it's the culmination of decades of thrusting the responsibility for raising thousands of kids beyond just teaching them the curriculum onto teachers — but the school admins handled this really poorly. You cannot just give parents a 48 hour heads up about cancellations like that. Lots of parents simply don't have alternatives for their kids during the day and you can't force them to come up with those options with so little notice.

I also worry about districts resorting to virtual learning as a crutch like this, given the documented and widespread learning loss over the past two years, particularly among poor and black and brown kids. Also, and maybe I'm totally off base and wrong here, but I had the impression that virtual learning was really shitty and burdensome for teachers too, so how does resorting to something like "virtual learning Fridays" help them?

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Commuting I would wager.

Commuting is stressful.

 

[FliX]

Not surprised.
A teacher-friend's school regularly closes for days on end because they are just conically understaffed...

Treating teachers and paying them like shit in this country was bound to have repercussions sooner or later....

 

[Darkstorne]

I'm in the UK, so of course a lot of factors are different here (especially when you consider we're more supportive of covid measures like mask wearing, and don't have critical race theory issues... yet...) but my wife is a teacher and I asked her about the potential for teaching at home one day a week or more recently and she was adamantly against it, stressing how much more difficult it had been teaching remotely compared to being in the classroom where she can really interact with students individually, make sure they're all genuinely paying attention, enforce rules and stopping misbehaviour much more easily, and get a look at what each of them are writing when necessary. She'd be massively against this move, and is really glad to be back in the classrooms 5 days a week now.

I don't know what the wage differences are between UK and US though. Teachers are pretty well paid over here, with solid starting salaries and a clear ladder for wage progression. Still massively over-worked, but my wife is insistent that remote teaching slowed down learning so much that there's now a massive backlog, and kids are far worse behaved than they were pre-pandemic because they've not been exposed to the clear hierarchy of authority that schools have. Teaching from home would make it worse. It's far too reliant on parents making sure the kids are doing their work, behaving, paying attention, and that's just not something parents can reliably do all day (for soooo many reasons).

 

[entremet]

Not surprised.
A teachers friends school regularly closes for days on end because they are just conically understaffed...

Treating teachers and paying them like shit in this country was bound to have repercussions sooner or later....

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The whole funding model is borked. Property taxes. So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

 

[LegendofJoe]

Teachers just need to be paid more. And to go along with that train/hire more teachers so classroom sizes can be reduced. That way they can actually use the summer break to recharge instead of having to pick up another job to make ends meet.

 

[butalala]

I'm "celebrating" my one-year anniversary of leaving teaching teaching. When I left, we were doing something like this and it helped a lot. I miss my students and some of my colleagues a lot, as well as the creative side of it, but I don't miss working in the evenings or on the weekends.

 

[dDASTARDLY]

Yup, they've been calling it "mental health days" and my kids have been out at seemingly random times.

No problem since I'm still lucky enough to wfh.

 

[FliX]

The whole funding model is borked. Property taxes. So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

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Totally it's some dystopian shit, that just happens to be real life in the US....
Couldn't make it up tbh...

The missus is super happy to have started teaching at a fully virtual school this year.

 

[entremet]

Totally it's some dystopian shit, that just happens to be real life in the US....
Couldn't make it up tbh...

The missus is super happy to have started teaching at a fully virtual school this year.

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It made sense when were a younger country. Not today though.

 

[Cenauru]

I do think this is more nuanced though.

The school and work model is decades old by now. So the pandemic disruptions were a whole new beast. Combine that with growing precarity, the growth of non-traditional family models, creates a lack of durability when things like in person schooling is not available.

What's interesting that the Paid Family provision in the Biden bill would cover this stuff. But this will likely be gutted or severely reduced in the Senate. Or may not be passed at all.

Employers basically call all the shots.

Click to shrink...

Yeah I just remembered companies have a stake in this too. I honestly fear for the mental health of both children and teachers the most right now, my school experience was terrible and messed me up, but I can't imagine what children and teachers are being forced through right now.

 

[bangai-o]

I've been teaching for fifteen years and I am really feeling it this year. I teach high school but I often feel like I am correcting middle school problems, and so the challenge has been adapting. I love my kids, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't looking to move out of the classroom. I've been considering moving to education technology for a while and this might be the year that finally breaks me.

Click to shrink...

I'm in an elementary and we're having the same issue. Our 5th graders are acting like 2nd graders (while simultaneously having the typical attitude problems that come with getting close to MS), our 2nd graders are acting like kindergartners, and we had a surprising amount of kindergartners that came to school this year not potty trained.

My nail-on-the-chalkboard issue this year is kids not understanding what an indoor voice is. They're constantly shouting across the room at each other...

Click to shrink...

Basically, many parents are not teaching their children any kind of literacy skills from birth to 5. So, kids arrive in kindergarten not even knowing their letters. It puts them behind throughout the grade levels.

 

[gilko79]

I work in public education, too. I'm not a teacher (tech admin) but I have seen far more turnover than in years past. In fact, we were given a 'retention bonus' this year. I don't know that it's helped much, but school districts are absolutely overwhelmed and understaffed right now.

FWIW, I am in a deep red state and we have no virtual learning option.

 

[Ouroboros]

I work at a school. All of our teachers are burnt out. I'm afraid that we will lose a lot of good ones at the end of the year.

 

[nonoriri]

I mean I kinda get it. A lot of my coworkers are engaged parents but at the same time, we only get 4 weeks of PTO (which is really good in comparison to a ton of workers) and the agreement signed for working from home is that you can't be providing childcare. So maybe not a big deal if your kids are older but could be huge if they're younger elementary. Our system really isn't designed for anything other than kids being in school 5 days a week.

But I also feel it from the teacher's end. My friend is a teacher and she is so burnt out working 1st grade because with the pandemic these kids are so far behind emotionally and mentally. She's decided to stop teaching kindergaten and teach high school instead. Which I'm glad kids will still have her but she was fantastic with the little ones. We need to be compensating teachers more and supporting them more.

 

[Fiction]

When schooling doubles as childcare because people are too fucking poor to afford it or are struggling to raise kids on their own, this is going to happen. Women are vanishing from the work place because the responsibility falls on them the majority of the time even in two parent households. Hell, I'm a widow with three teens who largely look after themselves but I still can't go to any school functions like my daughters band stuff because I have to work nights. It fucking sucks.

She has severe adhd and teachers keep asking me to let her do after-school tutorials and I'm like...I have no one to pick her up, I start work at 4. They must all think I'm a shit mom.

And of course since I'm in Texas online options are actually illegal.

 

[entremet]

When schooling doubles as childcare because people are too fucking poor to afford it or are struggling to raise kids on their own, this is going to happen. Women are vanishing from the work place because the responsibility falls on them the majority of the time even in two parent households. Hell, I'm a widow with three teens who largely look after themselves but I still can't go to any school functions like my daughters band stuff because I have to work nights. It fucking sucks.

She has several adhd

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Yeah, this is not talked about much, but the pandemic was particularly horrible on female workers. This is what happens due to our minoritarian rule.

 

[Travo]

The burnout is real. This has still been a difficult year.

 

[cdigs]

I'm in my fourth year teaching high school. I might have one more year in me, but I'm already thinking about what I want to do when I leave teaching. It has been an OK experience overall, but this year has been the biggest struggle. While I want to feel bad for my students who have had a hard time, it's safe to say most of my students just don't care about getting an education. I have successfully talked to... I don't know, two parents this year that I thought cared about their kids' performance? It's insane to me. If the students don't care, and their parents don't care, why should I care so much for them? It's so draining.

 

[bionic77]

As a not-a-teacher, what do you think is causing some of this? Is it skipping basically a year and a half of in-person learning, or is this more of a parental issue that starts at home and just bleeds everywhere else?

I've always had a soft spot for teachers, because I hit a fork in the road and could have become one. I bet I am one in some parallel universe. Kinda glad I skipped it in this one though. It seems like absolute hell :\

Click to shrink...

Its really hard for younger kids to learn online via a computer. My kids did their entire 4th grade online and it was not as productive as a regular year at school. I see a huge difference in them socially and in their ability to pick up new concepts in just 3 months of being back at school.

My wife is at home now but not everyone has that luxury and I don't think my kids could have coped without her help last year.

Also from my anecdotal experience some parents actually don't know how to hep their kids with some of their homework or learning. I remember several parents telling me that common core was beyond them and they were frustrated when they could not help their kids the way they wanted to. You cannot understate how much it helps to have extra help at home.

 

[Blader]

It's becoming more and more obvious that school is just cheap daycare to some parents. The complaints I've seen from parents actually having to be with their kids is saddening

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yo, what? I know that many parents are just straight up horrible to teachers, but characterizing anger over class cancellations/virtual learning as "not wanting to spend time with their kids" is really disingenuous. Parents have to work during the day! Many parents don't have WFH options and not coincidentally many of those same parents do not have alternative options for someone to watch their kids during the day. Even for the parents who can WFH and watch their kids during school hours, doing that while working is fucking hard.

 

[Cenauru]

yo, what? I know that many parents are just straight up horrible to teachers, but characterizing anger over class cancellations/virtual learning as "not wanting to spend time with their kids" is really disingenuous. Parents have to work during that day! Many parents don't have WFH options and not coincidentally many of those same parents do not have alternative options for someone to watch their kids during the day. Even for the parents who can WFH and watch their kids during school hours, doing that while working is fucking hard.

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Bad wording on my part, didn't mean all. However it's been a bit aggravating seeing the parents who DO treat their children like shit because they have to see them more, which I've primarily seen in conservative families who clearly don't understand how to raise a child and expect teachers to do it for them.

Partly because it also mirrors some of my own experiences growing up.

 

[HylianSeven]

It's becoming more and more obvious that school is just cheap daycare to some parents. The complaints I've seen from parents actually having to be with their kids is saddening, how are teachers not paid for the extra responsibilities of practically being parents to so many children on top of teaching them fundamentals in life?

Edit: and also how much companies push for schools to stay open so they can overwork working parents instead of parents spending time with their children. Everything about how schools and teachers are treated is disgusting.

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This is a really shit take to frame this as being on the parents "complaining about actually having to be with their kids". If they could do that and not work, they would have. They have to work, school is free/cheap, and you take that away and that throws a lot of things out of balance.

 

[Merv]

Bad wording on my part, didn't mean all. However it's been a bit aggravating seeing the parents who DO treat their children like shit because they have to see them more, which I've primarily seen in conservative families who clearly don't understand how to raise a child and expect teachers to do it for them.

Partly because it also mirrors some of my own experiences growing up.

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My sister in law is a Trumper. She doesn't work, and bitched constantly about having her kids at home last year. Before the kids were old enough for school they paid a nanny to care of the kids nearly full time.

These people exist.

 

[MrMegaMill]

Teacher here too. In Canada, where we get paid an actual competitive wage, but still. Burnout is real y'all. I took a mental health day yesterday for the first time this year and it felt glorious. Other teachers need to do the same, otherwise I am worried about the drop out after this year is finished.

In addition to this helping curve burnout, there is actual research that backs the idea of a 4 day school week (from before the pandemic, mind you). It helps curve student anxiety, workloads, and negative behaviour, while giving teachers an extra day to plan/mark/create materials. I usually have to give up my Sundays to do that now.

 

[Cenauru]

This is a really shit take to frame this as being on the parents "complaining about actually having to be with their kids". If they could do that and not work, they would have. They have to work, school is free/cheap, and you take that away and that throws a lot of things out of balance.

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Yeah I had just woken up and misunderstood the main point of the thread. This was probably not the right thread for my comment, I'll edit it out.

 

[SRG01]

Teacher here too. In Canada, where we get paid an actual competitive wage, but still. Burnout is real y'all. I took a mental health day yesterday for the first time this year and it felt glorious. Other teachers need to do the same, otherwise I am worried about the drop out after this year is finished.

In addition to this helping curve burnout, there is actual research that backs the idea of a 4 day school week (from before the pandemic, mind you). It helps curve student anxiety, workloads, and negative behaviour, while giving teachers an extra day to plan/mark/create materials. I usually have to give up my Sundays to do that now.

Click to shrink...

I currently give up my weekday evenings for marking and prep so that I can have mental health weekends... which isn't sustainable once a baby is here.

 

[Thordinson]

Teacher here too. In Canada, where we get paid an actual competitive wage, but still. Burnout is real y'all. I took a mental health day yesterday for the first time this year and it felt glorious. Other teachers need to do the same, otherwise I am worried about the drop out after this year is finished.

In addition to this helping curve burnout, there is actual research that backs the idea of a 4 day school week (from before the pandemic, mind you). It helps curve student anxiety, workloads, and negative behaviour, while giving teachers an extra day to plan/mark/create materials. I usually have to give up my Sundays to do that now.

Click to shrink...

Isn't there also research that shows shorter school days and later start times are beneficial as well?

 

[BobLablow]

No in-person classes on Fridays is more traumatizing than school shootings and active shooter drills.

Murika.

 

[Thordinson]

No in-person classes on Fridays is more traumatizing than school shootings and active shooter drills.

Murika.

Click to shrink...

Not really traumatizing but many of the parents who are low income do not have access to childcare so taking the day off would be incredibly hard for them.

 

[BranCrackr]

More pay is great of course, but burnout is burnout regardless of the money you're earning.

If anything, hopefully salary increases entice more people into an educator career

 

[Razgriz417]

Key points:

• 2 years into the pandemic teachers are burned out
• Some districts are going remote only Fridays to help with this along with cleaning protocols for COVID
• The GOP sparked anti-CRT debates have also taken their toll.
• The virtual teaching infrastructure developed at the height of the pandemic has helped make this move possible.

I do think the last minute updates here were done poorly. Single and low income parents have fewer options to cope. If this was something that was adopted they should've given parents more runway to plan and coordinate childcare.

However, American education is a mess. Teachers are underpaid, overworked, blamed for everything. The pandemic really revealed that our society doesn't care for teachers, nurses, doctors, and so on.

Click to shrink...

source?

 

[Gothar]

My mom has been an elementary school teacher for 25+ years. Teaching runs in the family; my great-grandpa was a teacher, my mom is a teacher, I'm a teacher, and my aunt is a teacher. She was planning on continuing to work for another few years before retiring, but I'll be extremely surprised if she's still in the classroom next year, she's close to being done.

She still loves the kids, but feels like more and more responsibilities are being thrust on teachers as positions are discontinued (some schools in our area don't even have dedicated school nurses or librarians, for example - they travel between schools) without a real increase of pay, parents are becoming more and more disrespectful and treat teachers as customer service representatives instead of educated professionals with bachelor and master degrees (not to say that treating customer service representatives like shit is acceptable either, but more in the "I'll continue to escalate this until until my child has the grade I want them to have" way), schools aren't really able to hold kids accountable for their actions due to how funding works (suspensions mean the kid isn't in the building, which means, at least here in Texas, that school is losing money). The list goes on and on.

I'm in my 7th teaching; 4 in Korea and 3 in the US, and my goal is to be out of the classroom in 2 years. I will be that 40-50% statistic that leaves the US classroom within 5 years of starting, but it's pretty clear to me that that happens for a reason. I still want to be in education, but I hope to transition to curriculum design or ed tech. The way I was treated in Korea by students, parents, and the system as a whole is night and day compared to here (although I will say I'm one of the rare ones that has a fantastic admin team).

Click to shrink...

Hey, thanks for being a teacher here in Texas. Some of us really do appreciate what you do. I always try to be the parent that both stays out of the teacher's way and also supports their decisions in anyway I can. Little things like suspensions and discipline really needs to be re-vamped, but hope you find more parents that support you and we can talk about how you're still in education 5+ years from now...and enjoying it.

 

[Deleted member 9241]

Starting this year, our kids come home about 1.5 hrs early on Monday for the same reasoning. I think that would be a little easier to work around than an entire day off. But the article in the OP is only for December and winter break is right around the corner so it should have little to no actual impact other than childcare for those that require it. We're more than a third way through the school year already!

 

[entremet]

source?

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It's in the article lol. I was just summarizing it.

Starting this year, our kids come home about 1.5 hrs early on Monday for the same reasoning. I think that would be a little easier to work around than an entire day off. But the article in the OP is only for December and winter break is right around the corner so it should have little to no actual impact other than childcare for those that require it. We're more than a third way through the school year already!

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The pushback is more about the last minute notice.

 

[Violence Jack]

Our close family friend is a teacher. She's been so stressed out lately that she's actually made herself sick, but doesn't want to call out because they have no one to backfill her. And also in some of the rural parts of my state, they've been closing schools every Friday during this entire semester because teachers are so underpaid and having to deal with parents yelling at them for bullshit.

The public education system in this country is fucked. Start giving these teachers big stipends or just pay them a whole lot more. Frankly, teachers should be making as much as doctors for the shit they have to go through.

 

[Razgriz417]

It's in the article lol. I was just summarizing it.

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theres no link to the article in your quotes nor in your post