Virtual days replace end-of-year make up days
The Red ‘n’ Green conducted a survey asking students whether or not they preferred virtual days or make up days during the summer.
April 6, 2023
Berlin has had four snow day cancellations and three two-hour delays. Because of this, administration has decided that the school will have two virtual make up days. They were held on Tuesday, March 7 and Friday, March 10.
Virtual days are put in place because the state requires schools to have a certain number of instructional minutes. Because Berlin needs to make up some time due to weather cancellations, the district won’t have to extend school days or add full days during the summer.
“In my opinion, a rare virtual day can be productive and can be a better solution to recover minutes than extending the school day or adding in-person days to the end of the school year,” Principal Bryant Bednarek said.
A survey conducted by The Red ‘n’ Green shows that a majority of students thought the workload was fairly reasonable. With experiencing COVID, students are already familiar with working online. Some teachers assigned missing work time instead of new assignments.
“I just give a catch up day so students can work on any missing work they have. This past virtual day I handed students a worksheet to do at home to help them practice skills we are working on,” math teacher Andi Woyak said.
Having missing work assigned as homework gave junior Alexis Reabe time to catch up before spring break.
“It was nice having time to work on things that I haven’t had time to do at school. It gives me time to remove at least a little bit of stress,” Reabe said.
Virtual days can also be useful for teachers as well. For instance, one day was used for professional development day for staff.
“If we flipped that day to a regular school day, we would have lost our professional development day,” Bednarek said.
According to the survey, there were a few students that experienced some technical difficulties trying to access homework materials. This makes it difficult for students to turn things in on time.
“The problems I had were trying to open my assignments and it denied my access to the page. I had to wait until I was at school to open it,” Reabe said.
