Why is Kings Island Closed already on weekdays?

It's still the same number of school days, isn't it? Does it matter this much if it's half of August or half of June?

My school district started a week earlier, and ends only one day earlier, so no, they are not the same ammount of days.

Supposedly the reason for the earlier start is to allow more time to prep for state testing, but I haven't yet heard a good reason why said testing can't be pushed back later in the school year. The only excuse I've heard is that they want to make sure to get the results back to the schools before the end of the year, but if the schools are starting earlier, they're getting out earlier too, so I'm not sure how that helps.

My parents are retired teachers, so I could go on and on about standardized testing. It's just kinda funny how it's also impacting family vacations, the tourism industry, youth sports leagues... Hell, I saw back-to-school sales at Target starting July 4th weekend. "Back to school," when some districts just finished 3 weeks prior.

Another factor to take into account is that northern Ohio winters are unpredictable. It's alot worse for those that are in the snow belt. Maybe a reason some schools in northern Ohio start early is in case they end up using alot of snow days and need to make up days at the end of the year. But IMO, I think school districts are getting really soft nowadays. I've seen them call off school when there was barely any snow. Back when I was in school, they would hardly ever call off school, even on days when I thought they should've. I only remember making up days one year out of the whole time I was in school, and we only had to go 2 extra days.

We have 178 days of school. I thought the standard was 180 across the board. 1st day 8/31, last day 6/1.
You can have it both ways.

I have been told that by starting earlier they can finish the semester at the time the winter break begins. I know in some previous years final exams for a class were shortly after coming back from winter break. This way it is a cleaner cutoff.

There was a general rule here in Youngstown that school didn't start until after the Canfield Fair was over. Now it's starting before it even finishes.

Which is fine with me, less people there on a weekday.

Thabto said:

But IMO, I think school districts are getting really soft nowadays. I've seen them call off school when there was barely any snow. Back when I was in school, they would hardly ever call off school, even on days when I thought they should've. I only remember making up days one year out of the whole time I was in school, and we only had to go 2 extra days.

When I went to school, I only had 2 snow days (not make up days, days where the school was closed) for my entire K-12 career. One snow day was in the 5th grade and the other was in the 8th grade. I remember those distinctly because it was such a rare event back then. Totally agree that schools are getting ridiculous when it comes to snow days. There was a snow day in Cleveland last year because it was too cold to go to school. It was funny seeing Boston Mills ski resort packed with kids that day enjoying the ski slopes because it was too cold to sit inside of a heated classroom.

Keep in mind, State of Ohio changed school to 'Instruction Hours' instead of a minimum 182 days of school. This change happened at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year.

My district have tried a few things over the last couple of years because we are a rural area that has a lot of students that have projects in the Lorain County Fair. One year, they had school the week before the fair, then had no school the week of fair, and then resumed school as normal the following week. Once the fires were put out and the pitchforks were stowed away, they tried other adjustments to the school year, where they shifted when school started and end (by days, not time), which was the following Monday or Tuesday after the fair.

This year because of the 'Instructional time' language they opted to add 30 minutes to the school day. So our district will start on this coming Monday the 29th and will end school on May 26th, the Friday before Memorial day. The instructional time will be the same as it would have been with an 182 day school year, but just a few days shorter. This will be very interesting to see how it pans out. I'm pretty excited that this is a step closer to the Labor Day to Memorial Day school year.

And testing is just awful. OAA for third graders was stupid. I get the concept of assessing where 3rd graders are, but they did it through putting these kids through a series of tests on subjects they should know by the END of third grade and then never give the students or parents results of the testing. The feedback went to the teachers to craft their class topics based on it. Each kid is different, and as far as I know, they weren't grouping students together based on their own proficiency, so why even bother doing it?

I would hate to be a teacher this day and age.

Thee have been a lot more snow days and "cold" days but I think now some of that is motivated by liability. If the wind chill is bad enough to give you frost bite within 5 minutes or less and you have an emergency that requires you to evacuate your building you have a big problem. The district is responsible for the kids safety while they transport to and from so if there's any chance the buses are going to have trouble anywhere within district boundaries that makes admin question whether or not to call it off. I know the roads in front of my house are often just fine while the southern part of our district is impassable. The school I worked at last year had a really high percentage of walkers form poverty situations with poor adult supervision so then you worry about those kids being properly dressed for the weather walking alone.

The theory around these here parts is that they moved the school start up to coincide with "college move in" days. My kids moved in August 17th (one at U of Cincinnati the other at U of Toledo) that is the same day our public schools started.

Don't get me started on standardized tests. How about teaching real life things like "no Susie you can't apply for 25 credit cards and carry $40K in credit card debt, that is bad" or how to balance a checkbook. Or how to do math without a machine giving you the answer? Want to be entertained? Go to a store, when they ring up your items, say it comes to $8.22, give them a ten, let them ring it up and then say, "Oh! I have a quarter." They'll either stand there with a deer in the headlights look, use a calculator, or my personal favorite, give you the original $1.78 change plus the extra quarter you gave them!

Well here in Northern Virginia, some schools started on the 15th, and Everyone will be in school by next Monday. And we close school for 3-4" of snow, and some years there are easily 8-10 days worth of closures. However because most schools have a longer school day than the state requires, there are almost no make-up days. (It's about total hours, not days).

It's a political fight though. Most schools in the south of Virginia don't go back until after Labor Day, in what is literally known as the "Kings Dominion Law". KD and Bush Gardens, along with the Virginia beach area, successfully lobbied back in the late 80's early 90's to delay the start of school to get those last two weeks of vacation dollars flowing into the state coffers vs myrtle beach and florida. However, as the political climate has changed, schools in northern Virginia have used loopholes to get around it and start school earlier. And as KD becomes less and less a draw for northern Virginias (I know one school system who's band and choruses have pulled out of their trip to KD for this fall because they view the park as "stale) I can see that law getting flat out moved off the books. Bush gardens is more of a regional park, their not as affected by Virginias school situation as KD is.

The high school I go to is very strict on snow days, wasn't until a car slid and hit the side of a bus that we had a few snow days then.