As many young Arlingtonians have noticed, ours is the only county in the area to go to school December 22 and 23 this year. Every other county has this Monday and Tuesday off, and many even went as far as to make Friday, December 19 an early release day. Students are outraged that we have to spend those days in school while everyone else has off, and they claim that this schedule is ruining the holiday spirit.

Having school so close to Christmas will make traveling during the craze of the holidays pretty difficult no matter where you are going. In addition, we are probably not going to do anything important during those two days anyway because even the teachers do not want to work. Still, is having these extra days of school really all that unfair?

If you did your research, you would see that for the 2015 spring break, unlike more than half of the other schools in the area, we get an extra Monday off. We also get two more days of summer than everyone else except for Alexandria. So really, we all get the same amount of days off, they are just distributed differently.

However, against all reason, it still feels a bit unfair. If you are traveling, you will be caught right in the middle of the holiday rush. There will be traffic, crowded airports and people generally everywhere. Also, you will end up traveling on the day before Christmas Eve, which will make you tired and already fed up with your travel partners right before Christmas, and that never makes for a good holiday.

Furthermore, no one wants to be in class this close to the holidays, including the teachers. Odds are, a lot of people will just skip those days anyway. I think most teachers would do the same, but they are specifically instructed not to because there are not enough substitutes. Usually, that means they do not want to teach classes with only 50% attendance, so they make the students do busy work or watch movies, although there are always teachers who still do lessons.

Having school two days before Christmas will always seem a little unfair, no matter how much logic is applied against you. Just try to imagine those extra days on the beach during spring break and summer vacation, and enjoy what time we do have off this winter break.