After three long nine week periods of school, NA students are going to have a lengthy nine day spring break, the longest spring break the district has had in a while.

While the break will be longer than usual, it is also much later in the year. Spring break will be from April 9th through April 17th, which is over a week into the final grading quarter of the school year. Freshman Axel Standish says, “I think it’s not as good as it normally is because everyone will be incredibly burnt out.”

Sophomore Ruby Morris says, “I’ll take anything that can get my mind off of school and grades because it’s all just really stressful.” For students like Morris, the tradeoff of length versus lateness is worth it. A longer duration of the break means more time to recuperate before going back to school to finish off the year. 

The longer break will give students time to focus on their extracurricular activities without having to worry about school for nine days. Sophomore Spencer Liberto says, “[I am] probably going to work on practicing my instruments more, since marching and summer concert starts up around that time.” 

Other students will have time over break to visit family or go on short vacations during this year’s break. There is time to go to another state to see people who live too far away for students to see on a regular basis. Shorter breaks in prior years didn’t usually give students these opportunities to travel without missing school. 

Despite having extra time to do different things over the break, many students will be spending a portion of their break doing homework. Morris says, “Teachers never assign homework over winter break, but they usually do for the spring.” 

Since homework and studying for upcoming tests is often a place of stress for students, homework over the break could put a damper on the relaxation spring break is supposed to bring. It often feels like teachers assign more homework in the second half of the year, and spring break seems to be no exception to that.

Spring break will be here in just a few weeks. For some it will present the opportunity to detach from school stress for a few weeks, but for others that stress will stay with them because of break homework. The longer than usual break will hopefully give students more time to do activities with friends and family that school usually makes difficult for them to do.