Almost time to go back to school...

[Zen]

And for some, it can't start soon enough

[yellowrose93]

LOL School is so shcool.

My daughter starts back tomorrow, older son Friday and younger son Monday. Of course, the younger one should be starting tomorrow but he is on vacation with my parents. Seems so early to be back in school!!

[sgtiger]

yellowrose93, wow that is early. Ours schools don't start back till the day after Labor Day, which means I will have 2 weeks to play before I start school too.

[schnitzle]

Noooooo!! I'm still studying for finals (had to take classes summer quarter). My summer vacation doesn't start until Friday. NO SCHOOL!

Although if I were a parent I'm sure I'd be looking forward to the kids going back to school.

[azfiddle]

I teach in a school that follows a modified, year-round calendar. This is our fourth week of classes! But I will have 3 weeks off in late September and early October....

[Crankin]

There's a huge regional variation in when schools start. When I taught in AZ, we started the week before Labor Day and ended around May 30. Now they start around August 10-15 and end at the end of April it seems, or May 1.
Here in MA, there are some districts that start the week before Labor Day and some that wait until after the holiday. It was a *huge* cultural change when some districts started having their year start the week before. But, in years when Labor Day is late (like this year) and there are a lot of snow days, school was not out until almost July 1st a few years ago.
Now the push is to get rid of our "February" and "April" vacations, and have a spring break in March like the rest of the world.
I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.

[GLC1968]

Now the push is to get rid of our "February" and "April" vacations, and have a spring break in March like the rest of the world.

Nooooo! They can't do that!! I used to LOVE the fact that we had two vacations and that they happened when resorts and things were less crowded. That was one of the things I missed most about school in New England when we moved away!

When I was in HS in the Boston area - my school didn't grant snow days. Stupid school prided itself on not missing a single day of school due to snow since the blizzard of '78. Apparently during that one, the state police were dispatched to turn the busses around and take the kids home in my town - depsite a state of emergency! When I was in HS (80's) the newscasters use to joke that it was easier to just state which schools were open during snow storms - just ours. It was ridiculous. I hope that it has changed since then...that was stupid and dangerous!

[skhill]

My county started back on Wednesday, way too early. We're having some of our hottest weather of the summer right now, and the administrators swear that all the air conditioners are working, but I remember only too well how often they broke back in my day.... Gotta get in as many instructional days as possible before the testing, though...

[Crankin]

OK, GLC, I now know where you went to HS ... right down the road. I moved back here in 1990 and they were still subscribing to that theory. It ended just a couple of years ago, when there was a new superintendent or some other change like that. Plus, there were a couple of storms where the district got some very bad press for putting the kids and teachers in harm's way, trying to get to school in a blizzard.
Personally, I liked the February and April vacations for the same reasons you did, except that airlines leaving from Boston still jacked up the prices, even though it was generally much cheaper to stay in hotels, etc. during those times. We went back to AZ to visit a couple of times in February, and it was nice. I hate traveling in December, unless it's by car. I must say, though, since I left teaching, it's been really nice to take a x country ski trip in January, when no one is around!

[GLC1968]

Yep, just down the road! Good to know that they've changed their evil ways.

We lived on the northern most border of the town. My next door neighbors lived in Lincoln, actually. I hated HS, but I loved living in that area. I'd move back in a heartbeat if my southerner husband would do it. He complains about the winters here though...so there is no way!

[Owlie]

My school district started sometime around August 20th-25 (other area schools give or take a week) and ran through the first week of June. One week of spring break at the end of March, two weeks winter break. (They'd send us back on Jan 2 if they could...argh.)

They didn't like closing for snow either. The joke was that if [district] was closed, you knew it was bad. We did have a few 90-minute delays--that was fun, because they used the high school as the guinea pig. A couple of times they were really late getting the word out to the local news, so there were always a few people who didn't get that message. (And at least one of those times, they decided to close!)

[Crankin]

GLC, not to get this thread off topic, but did you ever have a teacher, maybe principal by the name of Dave Connolly? He was actually one of my teachers in middle school, in Newton, and I am pretty sure he went on to your high school.
OK, totally off topic.
And Zen, that picture of school spelled incorrectly will get the anti-education/teacher faction going.