Staff Development Day
November 4th, 2008 | 
Author: Being a homeschooler means that your children “go” to school whenever you want them to. Often, we have days off when others don’t, and the reverse is often true as well. There’s been plenty of Winter “Vacations” that we’re vacations at all for my boys. That’s one of the nice things about homeschooling, we’re free to do what ever the heck we want, WHEN ever we want!
So today, as I was working in my office (by working I mean sitting at my desk doing pretty much nothing, because it’s a dead day for oversized transportation permits), I noticed that the kids that live behind us were still bouncing on their trampoline at 9am. Then I noticed the boys next door were in our yard playing soccer. What the heck was going on???
So I went to our lovely school district website to see what the heck was going on. Right on their front page they have a little tiny news snippet saying ” Nov. 4th District Wide Staff Development Day”. Of course there’s nothing saying what they heck that means or why it just happens to be on Election Day. So I went surfing around the web to see if there were other school districts conveniently taking today off to vote. Low and behold, they are! I don’t think that they ALL are, but I think a huge majority of schools are taking today off.
The question is, are they taking today off to vote? If they are taking today off just to vote, why are they doing this? I mean, don’t the rest of us have to work during the day and squeeze in voting around our busy schedule? And what about the burden this puts on parents who’s children aren’t in school? How understanding are all those businesses going to be to allow their parent employees the day off to allow the local schools to send the teachers out to vote?
Voting is extremely important, but the polls are open pretty early and stay open pretty late. My specific voting poll is open from 7am – 8pm. So no matter when I decide to go vote, I’ll be able to. I don’t see why teachers can’t do the same thing.
What do you think? Do you think the teachers are taking today off to vote or for actual “Staff Development”?
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Not sure…is the school a polling place? Our local school isn’t and has class as normal. But if they’re turning the schools over to the election, it would sort of make sense to just do a staff development day.
And if they are doing staff development, the teachers will likely not be free to get down to the polling unless it is at their school and they live in that precinct. The breaks aren’t very long and our development days actually went past when students are normally released.
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I know I am late to comment on this one, I was just checking out your blog
I think they do that for schools that act as polling places. Schools are usually pretty skittish about strange people walking around during school hours, and when they are acting as a polling place, there would be LOTS of people walking around on campus. I can see where it would make a great deal of sense to just have a staff development day or what ever in order to just bypass any potential issues.
That’s JMHO.
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