Here's a great story by Dave Barry on this topic from today's Miami Herald.
School on August 8? Are they insane?
Full text of article:
Here's a multiple-choice test:
When should the school year start?
A. Sometime around Sept. 1, when most of the United States of America has started school for many decades.
B. On Aug. 8 -- also known as ''smack dab in the middle of summer'' -- when the average Florida classroom is roughly the same temperature as a pizza oven.
If you answered ''A,'' you are correct. If you answered ''B,'' you are an official of Miami-Dade or Broward public schools. These officials have decided that our children need to start school on Monday, when children from normal places are vacationing with their families, or attending summer camp, or lying on the sofa picking their noses and playing video games, which is what God clearly intended early August to be used for.
Among the children who will be trudging into Miami-Dade schools on Monday is my 5-year-old daughter, who enters kindergarten this year. When my wife told me the date our daughter would start school, my fifth question was: ``Why?''
(My first four questions, in order, were: ''Aug. 8?'' ''Did you say Aug. 8?'' ''You mean, like, the eighth day of AUGUST?'' ``Are they INSANE??'')
I found out that the reason for the extremely early start of the school year is -- as you veteran parents already know -- the FCATs. FCAT is an acronym standing for ``(Very bad word) Comprehensive Assessment Test.''
These are standardized tests that are administered to all public-school students in Florida to confirm the sneaking suspicion among us older people that these kids today are just not as sharp as we were, dadgummit.
The FCATs have come to dominate public education in Florida. At one time, the purpose of the public schools, at least theoretically, was to educate children; now it is to produce higher FCAT scores, by whatever means necessary. If school officials believed that ingesting lizard meat improved FCAT performance, the cafeterias would be serving gecko nuggets.
So what they've been doing is starting school earlier and earlier, to give teachers more time to drill the kids for the FCATs, which are given in February and March.
Last year, school started in the third week in August; this year it's the second week. If this keeps up it's only a matter of time before we're starting the school year around Memorial Day, which means parents will have to go on their family vacations without taking their actual families, keeping in touch with their children by postcard. (''Dear Dylan -- Disney World is great! Wish you were here! How do you like second grade?'') Yes, it would pretty much destroy childhood. But think of the FCAT scores!
Some other ways we might improve our FCAT performance are:
1. Expel students who are expected to do poorly on the FCATs. The school could send the parents of these students a letter that said: ``We're sorry, but we do not believe your child is capable of producing the kind of FCAT scores that we need to maintain our average here at Coral Snail Elementary.''
2. Import students to Florida from places that tend to produce high standardized-test scores, such as Japan.
3. Cheat. Hey, this is Miami-Dade County! If we can't cheat, what's the point of living here?
4. Instead of starting the school year insanely early, give the tests later.
Ha ha! I'm just kidding with that last one, of course. What a crazy idea! But I sure wish we could find a way to avoid the gradual elimination of our children's summers. I suspect many of you parents out there feel the same way.
In fact, that gives me an idea: Why don't we all write letters to our school board members telling them how we feel? We could collect all these letters and put them in a big box, and then, on the day of the next school board meeting, we could throw the box into a Dumpster. Because I seriously doubt that the school board cares what we parents think about this; if it did, it would never have decided to send our kids back to school on Aug. 8.
No, probably all we can do is shut up, pay our taxes and take our kids to school on whatever day works best for FCAT purposes. On Aug. 8, I'll be dropping my daughter off, with her little lunchbox in her little hand. We prefer to pack her lunch; she's allergic to gecko.
Can someone let me know which week in September you have off from school? I'm planning to go the last week of September and wonder if that might be impacted by all my Georgia/elsewhere friends 
