Half Days?

Half days.

They make no sense to me.  Now, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.  I’d rather the kids get out early than stay all day, especially on Fridays.  It does give us a little head start on the weekend.

But….

It still makes no sense to me.  What can be done in that time?  Is it seriously cost-effective to pay to run the place for half a day?  Though teachers are on salary, it still costs to operate buses, electricity, water, and feed everyone.  And the bus drivers, janitorial staff and kitchen staff have to be paid for this kind of day, right?

And if we hope to be environmentally friendly at all, it seems a bad idea.  All of the cars idling in the car rider line unnecessarily.  There has to be a lot of trash that’s generated throughout the day.  Because, they probably end up doing a fair amount of busy work, cause it is a half day and they’re all jacked up and my guess is, the  teachers are smart and know they aren’t there to learn a whole lot on that day.   And once again, there’s the trash that the cafeteria generates.

I cannot see the sense in it.

And I am not even a very practical person.  The practical among us must be driven nuts by this.

If anyone asked, and no one has, I’d vote for four-day weeks.  I think it would be so much better.  It doesn’t seem like they’d have to stay that much longer on those days.  After all, you’d be cutting out a lot of the “housekeeping.”  You wouldn’t have that fifth days lunch, recess, the time it takes to do the regular class room maintenance.  Would it not be cheaper too?  My whole half day argument would apply here.

Since I’m certainly not your committee kind of girl, and don’t ever see myself campaigning for change, I guess I’ll just pick my kid up at 10:30 on Friday and wonder what the point was.