Concurrent Students Groan as Spring Break Frustration Repeats

Spring Break is a time-honored tradition that gives students a breather after the long winter months of third quarter. But every year, Juab students issue a collective groan when they see that we have yet again scheduled our Spring Break on a different week than Snow College.

Snow College’s concurrent enrollment classes are popular among juniors and seniors as a way to take challenging courses in preparation for college and to get college credits without paying for housing, food, or full tuition. With the change this year to have A days and B days on the same days every week, Juab High School has become even more accommodating for students to take these advanced courses without interfering with their high school classes. However, there is still one annoying conflict that happens every year that interferes with students schedules: Spring Break.

The placement of Spring Break on the calendar seems so arbitrary. It is set down long before spring sports are scheduled, so it doesn’t need to planned around that. Juab’s break is not even between third and fourth quarters this year; it sits three weeks away from that junction. In 2022, Juab’s Spring Break is a full month after Snow College’s. This creates a hassle for every student who participates in concurrent enrollment. We don’t plan anything for Snow’s break because the majority of our classes are still being held at the high school. When we vacation during Juab’s Spring Break, we either have to participate through our own computers using the WebEx meeting software or watch recordings of class on our own time and submit our notes to ensure that we did so.

However, with the pandemic relaxing many restrictions on class participation and opening up options like these, many professors are cracking down on student attendance. In my IVC classes this year, every professor has written in their syllabus that each student can only submit notes on recordings twice before they begin to lose attendance points. A week-long Spring Break takes up both of those slots. This hurts CE students’ grades when they have to miss class for any other reason, such as illness, away games, or family emergencies.

The answer to this problem is to work with Snow when we schedule Juab’s school year to line up our breaks as much as possible, reducing unnecessary conflicts and encouraging Juab Wasps to take these upper-level courses. This scheduling format is what is best for students.