I'd rather see a discussion on school beginning the day after Labor Day and ending sometime during the week before Memorial Day. However, that is not the topic here :)

If we were to plan a vacation, it would be planned around our family's schedule not the school schedule.

I really do not like having a Spring Break. It is just an extra burden of cost and paying extra for daycare for our family. It is not cost effective to take a "Spring Break" vacation when everyone else does. I would rather the kids get out of school a week earlier, or start a week later.

If you count the 6 days for spring break and the 8 days for x-mas, that's 14 days off for the students in the last 2/12 months. I get that for the whole year!! Oh I forgot to mention 1 teacher workshop day on Jan.13th, Martin Luther King Jr. day, and Presidents day.Can we give them anymore? This is ridiculous!! Graduation on Friday June 8th of city day's sure will be nice won't it?

I think a spring break is a great break for the kids. I understand that extra daycare and some time off work isn't exactly what most parents want but they would have to do these same things if school ended a week early or started a week late. Parents forget that kids need a break sometimes from all of the studying and homework. So I don't look at spring break as a burden but more as a time to relax and just be a kid.

My old school distract, the kids had way more days off. Is it that there is to much truancy in this distract to allow time off. My high school kids think so. They feel that they don't get vacation days much to guaranteeing that all pass with the required number of hours to go on to the next grade. Makes you think. I myself love to have the kids home for spring break. They need breaks as much as we do. School is a lot of work, parents forget that sometimes.

I second everything BCS said. We've enjoyed time with our kids and both of us took off work tomorrow so we can have a nice family day. We've LOVED the perfect weather we've had this week, too; think of how antsy the kids would be in class this week. :)

As a former teacher in schools, I saw firsthand that kids, teachers, and staff all need breaks every now and then to relax and recover. Kids look forward to it and so do I. We don't take vacations during that time, though we'd consider it, but it's a nice excuse to spend extra time with your kids. Shorter summer breaks actually allow children to retain more knowledge; longer breaks mean more review time required at the beginning of each year. There have been tons of studies that show this. Year-round schools formed in response to this and I LOVED working in one. 5 weeks on, 2 weeks off; 1 month summer break. Of course, we need a decent summer break in Minnesota, so year-round probably wouldn't work here. Most families would be paying for an extra week of childcare in the summer without spring break, so the argument about childcare costs is moot unless you are typically off in the summer. Remember that the school district has mandated amounts of days of instruction and teacher workshop days, plus national holidays, so they can only change whether or not you have spring break; thus, affecting the start and end of school. It's about 60/40 split in favor of spring break, so they can't make everyone happy.

Spring break is a critical and a highly needed break for the kids!! Remember, family and activities are just as important, if not more important than school, which really should be secondary in our lives This society has spun out of control when it comes to State, Nation, and Worldly competition and the ridiculously fast pace of the world.. It all comes down to greed and the fight for the almighty Dollar!! This will be the demise of our family structure and society. In fact it may be too late!! Didn't mean to go off on a tangent, yet we need to realize this and stop worrying if were going to make our Nation or State required test scores.... Who really cares !! My kids will learn how to read etc without all this ridiculous fast paced competition. Slow Down !! Let the kids have their breaks and live their lives normally like we did when we were younger!! They are only kids once!! It's time to restructure what our true values are in this society. We are already burning ourselves out including our children !!

Couldn't agree more with those in favor of Spring Break...sure, it requires some schedule juggling...but it's not like the dates sneak up on you, you know about them nearly a year in advance...it's great for the kids to recharge for a week or so, and gear up for the final push. Especially when we have a long, cold winter (not this year!) they really need that time...none of my kids were given homework (end of the Trimester), so it's really a true break. We love it!

We have truly missed it the past years. We started saving the moment we spotted it on the calendar and went to Hawaii.

@ Mike Keating - I totally agree!!!!