2021-2022 Extended Leaning Calendar

[CAMILLE ROMERO]

Dear School Board Members, 

    My name is Camille Romero; I am a junior at Los Almos High School. I live outside of the Los Alamos school district area and I have been attending Los Alamos Public Schools for around three years now. I work two jobs, one full-time, and one part-time. I typically take Honors and AP classes at my school and would consider myself to be studious. I heard about the school's recent dilemma as to whether or not they should add ten more days to the Los Alamos High calendar during the years 2021-2022. Despite the recent loss of learning during the 2020-2021 school year due to COVID-19, adding more school days onto the following 2021-2022 school year will be inefficient, and result in students being overly tired and burnt out, resulting in an even greater loss at learning, jeopardizing school state testing scores and risking Los Alamos' reputation as one of the best public schools in New Mexico.

 

   Now, you may be thinking that a high school student may not know what is best for their own education. This is not entirely true, many students have planned out their whole lives, and have set goals they would like to achieve in order to have a successful feature. This means that we want to do what would be most beneficial for us to achieve. I myself am one of these students that want to go to college and have a good life. I have planned out that I would like to major in Business Marketing and minor in business management.  I want to get a nice house and work hard to have a successful life. Now because of this, I want to do everything in my power to make sure I can achieve this. By adding more days onto the High School year I will most likely slowly become burnt out from waking up at five in the morning, not getting home until ten, leaving me to quickly get sick from loss of sleep, and start to fall behind in my classes which essentially goes back to your intended goal of helping test scores and educational learning to drop. 

     I understand why adding on an extra ten days to the High School and an extra twenty-five days to the elementary schools. Although these extra days would help to boost teachers pay, and "theoretically" improve learning, some more complex situations are not thought of such as, teachers pay will still be taxed as inflation and such continue to arise, making the extra income seemingly unnoticeable, secondly students, especially high school students are often tried and burn out, and in order for education to be drastically improved by focusing on giving high school students enough time to rest and reenergize so that their minds can be more productive and focus and retain the information being taught in the classes. 

     Now, I understand that some events and decisions can not come to a qualifying conclusion, and either way it will leave one group of people pleased. I do believe that some of the calendar options that have been pre-derived to accommodate the extra ten days can be somewhat beneficial if there is no way around rejecting the extending learning proposal. I believe that calendar five and offers some helpful aspects like adding more frequent two breaks in between long blocks classweeks. Nonetheless, this would still take away our summer break. I believe calendar five would best accommodate this situation, but it would also be greatly beneficial if half days once a week could be added to that schedule as well. Lastly, although I do have a preference as to what will be passed, everything will still work out regardless of the decision. 

Thank you for your consideration of my proposal and thoughts regarding extended learning for the years 2021-2022. 

Sincerley, 

Camille Romero

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