Factoring in School and Kids for your DVC decisions

[Katie L]

All states have compulsory education laws. Texas is just more rude about it.

However, Texas is a state that shows clearly that it’s not concern about education, but about money from butts in seats. If it were about education, they wouldn’t allow you to homeschool for a couple weeks then come back. They allow that because once you’re off their books it’s a different money situation.

TX does everyone a favor by really highlighting what the concern is.

As a Texan, this resonates with me SO much. Why are people SO FOCUSED ON THE WRONG THING? I agree. It's kinda nice they are transparent about it - I guess. Cynical. But nice.

 

[_auroraborealis_]

I'll also say that at middle school we are already starting to run into scheduling issues for vacations.

• Baseball tournament season
• Scout camps
• other camps
• band
• ski team

Band is late summer/fall, including fall break. Ski team is winter, and overlaps spring break. Baseball tournament season is through end of July, and Scout camp happens sometime in there.

We are already in a stage of "have to choose" without throwing a vacation in the mix. And my kids aren't even hyper-scheduled like some other kids I know. Spring/summer is baseball. Fall is band. Winter is ski. Scouts is year-round, but we are Scouts+1 for activity, and Scouts is generally flexible save for the high adventure trek in summer. It's not like my kid plays hockey or something nuts.

 

[Brian Noble]

That's so much pressure to put on them. ... they must be terrified of making an actual mistake.

The pressure that high school students feel--particularly those in "well resourced" high schools--would probably surprise you if you don't have a current/recent high school student in your household. One of the biggest challenges we face with our new students here at U-M is helping them learn that perfection is not the goal, and that making mistakes and getting things wrong is an important part of learning and life.

(Insert joke about the football team demonstrating that here.)

you have to cross that bridge when you get there. Just make the best decision you can right now and try to stay flexible, your family needs will change, and then change again.

In hindsight with two kids aged 21 and 19, this is 100% correct. The one thing you can count on is that things will be different than you imagine, and sooner than you think.

We are already in a stage of "have to choose" without throwing a vacation in the mix.

And it's important to recognize that all of those things are just as important to the kids as family vacations are. For example, my son scheduled knee surgery around his senior year swim and dive season. Not because the sport was important per se (his primary sport was soccer) but because he did not want to miss out on the camaraderie of his last high school team. In fact, he was willing to risk being able to swim/snorkel during our trip to Hawaii celebrating his graduation to be able to have that experience. Luckily, the timing worked out with his surgery and recovery, but when it was a choice between being on that team and fully enjoying Hawaii, he chose the team.

 

[pineapplepalms]

The one thing that I haven't seen mentioned in here is that sometimes parent's don't have the flexibility to just go whenever it is convenient for the kids.

Absolutely. That's one of the many reasons why there just isn't a one size fits all way to do things for everybody. We're fortunate that we are flexible as to when we go on vacation, so it's really easy to time our vacations to when the kids will have their school breaks. They'll have some sort of school break for around 3 months of the year. That's plenty of time for us to plan vacations so that they don't have to miss school.

Like you said, it's just many individual decisions. For us, we have the flexibility to choose to go on vacation during their school breaks, so that's what we're planning to do. I don't think it's the end of anyone's world if our kids were to miss a week of school for vacation, but for us it is just so easily avoidable that there really isn't a good reason to miss school. DH and I both preferred not to miss school when we were growing up, and it was self-motivated and not because our parents were putting so much pressure on us to excel.

Not to mention we've been over July 4th week and absolutely loved it, we've been during Christmas/NYE week and had a blast, and we have a trip planned during Easter next year because of the Star Wars race weekend - and these are all of our own volition, not because we're trying to coordinate with any kind of school schedule yet because our kids are little. Anyway, time will tell how things will go... we're going to be flexible and deal with what we need to when we get there.

 

[LuigiSpice]

I'm a high school physics teacher and this is something of a pet peeve of mine. While I am sympathetic to the costs of traveling during school vacations, the burden of making up the work tends to fall on the teacher. This is particularly true in science where labs (which are required in my state and for AP courses) are not easy to make up in terms of equipment and in the case of chemistry, without substantial prep work. Now you may be saying "oh poor teacher with summers off complaining about having to work." I just say, if you want me to bear the same, if not more of the burden of catching your kid up, you have to take me to Disney with you.

Also, there is a reason why we have 20 kids in a class and its not because they learn better that way. Whether we want to admit it or not, education is a volume business. We work hard to make sure we reach as many kids based on learning styles, disabilities or just personally as we can, but as Spock said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

On a side note, I believe the consistent removal of students from school for leisure activities sets a bad example that makes their time at school much more difficult as you are basically telling them that school really isn't all that important. Then they go to college and expect the same level of accommodations and can't handle it when the professor tells them, "too bad."