Imagine finals are done and your exhausted brain needs a break, but instead of the usual three weeks you’re accustomed to for winter break, you receive two short weeks. It’s okay at first, you’re just happy you’re not at school, except, once you return you’re hit with college classes.
Middle College High School (MCHS) is not a stereotypical high school. This makes it no surprise that MCHS has had a different Thanksgiving and winter break in past years compared to other schools in the Santa Ana Unified School District. Although this year MCHS had a week off for Thanksgiving, which led to the two-week winter break, this is only a recent change that has given students the same break time frame as other SAUSD students.
Junior Johnny Orozco shares that although the three-week break was nice for relaxing and spending time with family, it was a lot harder for him to get readjusted into the school setting.
“It messed up my sleep schedule a lot back when we had the three-week break, and it was a lot harder to get back into the gist of things when we came back to school,” Orozco said.
Junior Alejandro Silva-Lopez shares his concern about the too-long winter break, saying that by the time we return, we have already forgotten everything. He states the two-week winter break is long enough to keep the information in our brains and a longer break just makes it drag on.
“I feel like two weeks is the perfect time because anything longer than that, and you’re basically losing the work ethic that you had during the semester,” Silva-Lopez said.
AVID teacher Amy Holte shares that teachers have a union representative who at the time was Rafael Ramos who represented teacher wants and in order for a decision about winter break to be made there has to be a 71% vote.
“We get to see what the SAC calendar is, and then Mr. Voight works to combine them. Holte said. “And then he says, ‘Well, here’s another option,’ and the union representative, so that’s like the teacher representative, reviews the calendar with him too. So we get some voice in making that calendar,” she said.
Principal Damon Voight shares another reason why we had a shorter winter break, which was student safety. Voight shares that many students had in-person classes, which made teachers wary of leaving them on the Santa Ana College campus by themselves.
“If we can make sure that classes are online so students don’t have to come on campus those three days for Thanksgiving, then we wouldn’t even have to worry,” Voight said.
The reduction of winter break has brought up many reactions on campus. Although students and staff alike have their own narrative of this change, it’s important to understand how the decision affects the school’s community, both positively and negatively.
