Given the significant reduction of workload, these weekends fulfill the purpose of enabling students to focus on other events on the weekends.

As a senior, I have been through the stress of attempting to balance an extracurricular life with my schoolwork. I have noticed that on homework free weekends, the burden is relieved of me where I spend my weekend dreading staying up into the late hours of Sunday night, rushing to finish the work assigned of me. Instead, I am able to focus on events like enjoying the high school experience of prom and homecoming, or being able to dedicate my full time and energy to college apps.

Humanities senior Shivani Levine also believes that Homework Free Weekends are helpful.

“I definitely notice that I have more free time, and I feel like I begin the week a lot less burned out than usual.”

With many studies coming out that demonstrate the effects of a heavy homework load on student stress levels, Homework Free Weekends are crucial to maintain a mentally healthy student body. A study published by the Journal of Experimental Education found that “most students experienced distress and/or lacked time to engage in important life tasks outside of school.” In addition, 72% of the students in the study were stressed due to schoolwork and 82% reported experiencing at least one physical symptom to stress.

Going forward, monthly homework free weekends rather than one per semester should be an idea administration considers. The amount of stress it relieves and free time it permits is extremely beneficial and influential to student’s happiness.

When entering Poolesville High School, we were told that we would have 3 hours of homework a night. While this might not always be the case, when factoring in doing notes for various classes this number becomes understandable. And, as expected, this amount of work on students leads to stress, which Poolesville is acknowledging and attempting to help with. The problem is that their solution isn’t effective.

Homework Free Weekends occur once every semester, and are supposed to, in part, allow students to relieve stress. For this weekend, teachers aren’t allowed to give out homework so that students can de-stress, have time to work on college applications, study for AP tests, or whatever else they need to do. However, there are a few glaring issues with Homework Free Weekends that are now prohibiting their ability to be successful.

One of the largest problems with the Homework Free Weekend are how teachers try to avoid it by over assigning work during the week or by giving out assignments on Thursday that are due Monday, but because of the workload that we already have assigned for Friday, the homework still has to be done over the weekend. This happens for almost everybody from at least a couple of classes, and this negates the entire purpose of the Homework Free weekend.

Although it makes sense for teachers to still want to assign homework, assigning work like this is very clearly done in order to get around Homework Free weekends. The work just shouldn’t be assigned. If we want to fix this, we need to instead adopt a system like Westland Middle School.

According to the Westland Middle School website,“Nothing can be due the first day back from these weekends/breaks even if the assignment had been announced in advance as a long-term project.” If we were to adopt a policy like this, Homework Free weekends would be able to be much more effective.

Many seniors also use the first homework free weekend to work on college applications, but if their one weekend without homework is used to work on something else then the Homework Free weekend isn’t serving its purpose. Homework Free weekends are meant to relieve stress from school, but how can this be possible while seniors need to spend the weekend working on something else.

According to the American Psychological Association, “Many teens… report feeling overwhelmed (31 percent) and depressed or sad (30 percent) as a result of stress. More than one-third of teens report fatigue or feeling tired (36 percent).”

We only have two Homework Free weekends, one in the end of October and the other in the beginning of May. This is especially a problem with the weekend in May because May has only one day off, and March only has two half days. This means that there are stretches of the second half of the year where students have no time to relieve stress and are being constantly bombarded by work while also having to study for AP tests. While we can’t adjust the MCPS calendar, we do have the ability to prevent teachers from overloading students on top of the already intense schedule.

Adjusting the calendar so that Homework Free weekends occur more frequently, whether once a quarter or once a month, would allow for more time for students to be able to alleviate their stress. This, when coupled with adopting a policy that prevents work from being due the Monday after would allow for Homework Free weekends to finally be as effective as they should be.