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.