Continuing to attend school in the beginning of June should not be allowed. Mount Vernon currently has snow days built into their schedule, but Iowa weather is too unpredictable to decide how many days will be canceled. Schools should only be able to make up an additional five school days due to cancellations because of planned vacations, summer jobs, and summer sports.

Many families plan vacations a long period of time before they go on them assuming that school will get out on the correct date or a couple of days later. With the weather Iowa is having this year, many schools are going to have to go until June 5, like the MVCSD. In order for students to go on their vacation and finish school, some will have to cram many days of work into very few. Instead of school districts adding days on into June, they should take out the scheduled early dismissals.    

The main source of money for a lot of high school students is jobs during the summer. As those students continue the same jobs from the summer before, or continuing to work as the year goes on. According to Factank, roughly 35 percent of teens have jobs during the summer. If school goes on too late due to the weather, they may not be able to make it to work on time. One student affected locally is senior David Hermsen-White, who has a summer job in the Black Hills. Luckily, David is a senior so he will get out of school before the rest of the school to make it to his job. Also, if a business has a lot of students hired, they will need to find other employees to fill their spots.  

By the time school is supposed to be over, there are baseball and softball games being played with a specific schedule. With the addition of school days into June, level two and level three games are going to have to be rescheduled to night games in place of varsity practices. Varsity now has to find different times and facilities to practice instead of the game fields. Also finding buses and bus drivers can be an issue. If the game was supposed to be at noon, and got rescheduled for 5:30 p.m. the bus drivers may have had something else planned. Our first game last year was on May 21, and it’s around the same time this year. If that’s the case, then there will be two weeks of rescheduling for teams to be on the right facilities.

There are too many things going on for students at the end of the planned school year. When making up at most five school days, we will still be getting most of the education we need. By adding 10-20 minutes onto each day, that’s only about 1-2 minutes each class period, and students would use that time to put their things away. With scheduling the end of school at May, 20, there will be plenty of time to make up those five days with exception to family vacations, summer jobs, and sports.