Teachers and students are already frantically trying to prepare for AP exams after all the snow days, but at least FCPS is doing what it can to help out with two makeup days in… June?
In terms of bizarre decisions, keeping us in school through June 24th – as is currently scheduled – should win some sort of award. We have four makeup days in total, but half of them are happening after AP exams, when we are tested on our entire course curriculums. What exactly is the point of two extra days tacked on to the end of the school year after we’ve already been forced to learn everything?
Let’s be clear here: we don’t have time. As explained in our last issue, we start school later than in most parts of the country, meaning we have less time to prepare for the AP exams every year. With twelve snow days on top of that, many AP teachers are feeling serious pressure to get their students ready in time. Some teachers have thrown entire lectures on Blackboard with the instructions “Learn it yourself,” and others are now teaching entire lessons and testing during Learning Seminar in an effort to get students ready in time. In other words, those of us in AP classes could use the extra time those makeup days could provide.
Of course, maybe we’re being selfish. It’s not like the entire Fairfax County Public School System should be obligated to support us overachievers that decide to take college-level classes at ages as young as 15. After all, that was a choice we made, not something we were forced into. It’s not like there’s an entire grade of students that will miss these makeup days too, since they’re graduating. Oh. Wait.
That’s right; the entire senior class of FCPS has to take their finals before the makeup days too. Meaning even kids who didn’t “choose” to take APs—we put that word in quotation marks here since we all know the administration pushes us pretty hard to take at least one or two of these classes each anyway—even those kids are still going to be forced to learn everything well before the end of June.
So, given that an entire grade of students, along with every kid enrolled in an AP class, will be forced to have all their class material learned well before those makeup days, regardless of how hard that may be, we feel like we should ask an important question: why are we even having them?
Well there’s a simple answer—it’s the law. Unless the FCPS school board requests a waiver from the state due to a governor-declared state of emergency, we have to make up snow days according to their rules. But for whatever reason, the Board still hasn’t requested that waiver – even though a state of emergency has been declared twice this winter. Of course, they still might, after the most recent snow day on March 17. It’s already bad enough that FCPS has scheduled us for two pointless days in June rather than request a waiver, but at the very least they should stop dragging their feet on the most recent cancellation, leaving everyone hanging as to how it will be made up.
Either it is possible to get ready in time for APs and finals after twelve snow days, or it isn’t. But either way, we’re going to find out the hard way, thanks to FCPS’s inexplicable refusal to request a waiver. Either FCPS should give us useful makeup days, or they should give us none at all. Giving us two days at the end of the year so they can check off the “four makeup days” box is only embarrassing them.
It is our humble opinion that if those days were so important to our educational well-being, they wouldn’t be scheduled in a way that keeps the entire twelfth grade from ever experiencing them.