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DESPITE PETITION, SCHOOL CALENDAR NOT GOING TO CHANGE

Loudoun County Public Schools won’t extend Spring Break this year.

If you haven’t already seen it, there is a petition circulating widely in Loudoun County right now, asking for the school board to extend Spring Break and make it two weeks long. The Burn checked with LoCo school officials, and as we suspected, it ain’t gonna happen.

“We stick to a fixed schedule,” said Wayde Byard, the public information officer for Loudoun County Public Schools. “The calendar is set the year before so families can plan vacations and plan childcare … If people don’t have childcare, that could be extremely expensive and disruptive on short notice.”

Wayde Byard, PIO, Loudoun County Public Schools

The petition, allegedly written by an LCPS student and posted to Change.org, had more than 4,700 signatures when we last checked. It’s being heavily shared on social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. The Burn heard people talking about it over the weekend as well. The premise is that Loudoun schools build in 15 extra days to be used as snow days. Since there hasn’t been a need for snow days this year, the petition says students will be in school “longer than necessary” and advocates adding five weekdays to Spring Break.

Another suggestion being bandied about suggested the district use the extra days by ending the school year a week early. However, as the petition notes (and Byard corroborated), many end-of-year test dates (SOL, AP, etc.) are set by the state or nationally and cannot be changed.