A bad survey from FCPS

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) has a calendar problem. We’ve bloated up the school year with holidays, extended breaks, teacher work days, elementary school half-days, and confusing “religious and cultural observance days”, where school is in session but classroom activities are limited in various ways. The sum total of all this is an absurdly small number of five-days school weeks, and an even smaller number of actual five-days-of-learning weeks, all despite a school year that runs from mid-August to mid-June, making for a very short summer. It’s a mess. More or less everyone seems annoyed by this. But there’s little consensus on how to fix it. Should we shorten the current two-week winter break? Eliminate/shorten Spring Break? Reduce the number of religious holidays? Stop observing all the federal holidays? Kill the elementary half-days? Chuck the cultural observance days? Dump the teacher work days? In April, the school board voted to have school on Veterans Day, and to limit…