Right there with you and can we also discuss the ridiculousness of the school year ending at 11:15am on Tuesday and yet none of the camps start till the following week. 5 hours of school over 2 days does not count as a week! It’s barely one full work day!
YES. Also I swear that I remember my school year being shortened by a day or two if we didn't use all the planned snow days...but my kids' school keeps the same ending day and just has an extra long weekend here and there in April and May. At this point in June I'd rather just have more days with 0 school than planning around 2 hours of school 😅
This is so disorienting. We got out of school almost a month ago. It’s always the Thursday before Memorial Day. When do your kids go back? But no, we don’t have half days ever. (North Dakota) It would be incredibly frustrating. Finding care on snow days is hard enough.
I live on the east coast and have a lot of family and friends in the Midwest and it seems like our kids are always offset by a full month! We go from the Wednesday after labor day to late June.
I think this is partly about history and weather, and partly about how many mid-year breaks there are. I grew up in Minnesota, where my grade school (and most schools in the state) started the day after Labor Day, and finished in early June. My high school started a week earlier and I was *deeply* offended. Out in California, the spread is longer, with schools starting anywhere from mid to late August, and mostly ending in early June, but there's also an entire extra week off of school in February, which is technically called "February break" but is functionally called "ski break" by a plethora of bougie families who like to drive to Tahoe or wherever and can't wait until spring break because it might be too warm for snow by then.
Well, I don't know why New York does a February break, but having a post-Labor Day start and an extra week of vacation compared to the Midwest would certainly explain why school isn't getting out until late June!
They’re called minimum days here and I hate them. Twice a year for parent conferences and twice a month for teacher in service days. I don’t begrudge teachers the time at all. I super hate the extra hours I have to figure out how to fill.
As a parent, I hear ya! Half days almost always come with arguments over which parents work day is more crucial than the others... As a school board member, I know there are reasons involving draconian rules regarding how many professional development days are required vs how many student days are required and the nonsensical way they are counted. I do suggest attending a board meeting and voicing your issues! I try my best to bring it up as well, but it's not always heard.
AAAARRRGGGGHHHH. I feel your pain. Here in Switzerland (where the school year ends in July and restarts mid-August, making summer programs more or less obsolete) we have just survived the period of ‘no 5 day weeks.’
May is peppered with various holidays— in my Catholic canton, several religious ones that fall on a Thursday so that means Friday is also free. It is completely mad. When the kiddos go back to a five-day week in June (with another 5-6 weeks left in the school year), no one wants to do anything anymore.
This includes the teachers, who cancel classes with abandon and plan ‘project days’ whose hours do not coincide with regular school days.
In case you were wondering: this society more or less encourages women to stay home after becoming mothers. Working a mini-job is socially permissible. As long as someone is available to cook a hot lunch during the 1.5 hour lunch breaks. (School cafeteria? nonsense. Tenth grade and up, only.)
We also have early dismissal Wednesdays for “teacher collaboration“ here in Southeast Missouri. It’s been the case for about five years now, so I guess I’m used to it, and my kids don’t require childcare anymore, but it was enraging for a while.
For us here in Missouri, it's just about 45 minutes earlier than usual. Before we started the every-Wednesday thing, it was about once a month they'd dismiss at about noon or so on a Friday for teacher collaboration. Then someone decided it should be every week, and it stuck.
Increasingly common here in Massachusetts, too, but it's just like 30-45 minutes earlier. We're going to have that next year as part of a move to an overall longer school day: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday will all be half an hour longer than our current schedule. Wednesday will be the same length as our current schedule but shifted 10 minutes earlier, since overall school will be starting 10 minutes earlier every day, which is fan-freaking-tastic for the people whose kids go to schools that already started at 7:55 and especially great for kids who take buses where they're expected to be ready and waiting 20 minutes ahead of the scheduled bus time. Obviously a schedule made by extremely smart people with the welfare of the students at the top of the agenda.
As I ask my children, do you want an answer or do you want sympathy?
1. Days over a certain cutoff count toward the minimums required for federal funding.
2. They're required by teachers unions in some locations.
3. They ensure that part time staff like cafe workers and bus drivers have work and get paid.
4. They provide breakfast and lunch to children who depend on the school for those services. This one went a long way in making me more tolerant of half days, knowing these meals are critical for many of my neighbors.
5. In my system, the after-school program is available from dismissal through end of day, so if you really need to you can still have inexpensive childcare.
We have a lot of very early dismissal days here in Missouri, too, but they don’t offer childcare afterwards and they don’t serve lunch! And this is true despite the fact that every single student in the district gets free breakfast and lunch through a federal program. We have early dismissal (by about 45 minutes) every single Wednesday for “teacher collaboration.” I’m pretty sure our early dismissal days are to get the required number of education days and teacher workdays in. Our district only recently started offering afterschool care for elementary students, so I’m hoping that they will be able to expand that program to include early dismissal days soon.
Thank you for sharing the rationale! This is really helpful to know. I don't think our school provides lunch to anyone on half days though. But breakfast, yes.
So, in our schools in Maryland, half days exist because our State law requires a kids to be in school a certain number of hours PLUS a certain number of days each year and at the same time the teacher contract requires a certain number of hours for them to get work done at the end of each quarter. So, they can’t have one full day to get the work done instead of 3 half days because the kids have to have a certain number of DAYS in school. If it was just an hours requirement then they could flex it however they wanted. It’s ridiculous. Our superintendent has tried to get our State legislature to change it for two years now. And twice it has been caught up in committee for nonsensical reasons. It’s maddening.
The days vs. hours thing is kind of like how as far as I can tell, days my kid gets sent home sick from school do not count toward measures of chronic absenteeism, even if he only makes it an hour or two into the day.
OMG don't get me started. It really felt like we could count on one hand the number of actual full weeks of school my daughter had this year, our first with the public school system. Every month on a Weds there is an early release day for professional development; both Friday and Monday off for Labor Day; all possible election days are off; 2 days off for fall break in Oct; Weds before Thanksgiving is also off, then the usual end of year/new years break (which is fine); 2 days off for midwinter break in Feb; a week off for spring break in March. And then the last day of school was also an early release day, but earlier than usual which just felt pointless. What do I do? Haha - we parents complain amongst ourselves, I understand I'm not getting much done in the afternoon of an early release day so try to not schedule any meetings, and we tried out a number of different camps during the breaks which we were fortunate to have options for in our area. But I don't think the camp thing is going to work in the future since my daughter didn't like the ones that actually are available during most of the breaks. It's overall such an annoyance to have to figure out (and pay for!) all the extra care needed.
For what it's worth, most private schools seem to have fewer days of school than public schools. (My mom always says the more you pay for school, the less your kid goes there.) Our neighbor kids who go to private school have been out for two weeks already and had longer winter break and had the same spring break and had a few random other days off.
Interesting. I recently talked with a parent friend who has children in a local private school and she much preferred the private school schedule since they didn't have early release days. As much I dislike the random days off, I feel it's very important to support public schools and attend our neighborhood school.
Interesting. I've found that private schools here (I'm in New Orleans) go the same number of days as the public, though possibly on a slightly different schedule (different start/end days, different breaks, etc.)
My kid's (private) school calendar is generally 179 days plus a few built-in hurricane days.
I'm pretty sure Louisiana also requires a certain number of hours/minutes in addition to or instead of days in certain circumstances, because a couple years ago when schools were closed for weeks on end due to the aftermath of Hurricane Ida and we'd burned through the hurricane days built into the schedule, a lot of schools decided to just add 20 minutes or so to the end of the school day every day for a few months to make it up rather than have to stay in session well into June (we're usually done by Memorial Day and go back in early August).
I have always heard of these half days in the States! (I'm in Canada). We don't do that here (at least not in my province). It boggles my mind. I can't fathom a reason for it. If it's because of teacher exhaustion, just put on a movie for the afternoon or something! Parents aren't expecting any real learning to happen at this time of year. Best of luck to parents dealing with this! Hang in there!
Wanna know the biggest reason why my kid is in a private Lutheran school that has no frills or fancy anything (we're Catholic)? Because they STAY OPEN ON A REGULAR SCHEDULE.
We sent her there for PK4 because we couldn't get a public PK seat for her (those aren't guaranteed in Louisiana unless you're low-income or have an IEP; in New Orleans, which has been pretty much all-charter since Katrina, if you get a public PK4 seat and aren't low income or with an IEP, you have to pay about $5K tuition for it, and not all public schools even offer PK4...free K-12 is obviously guaranteed for everyone...it's a complicated algorithm for how you get matched to a seat in a public school here but honestly it's probably the closest thing to fair as we can get, but that's another story).
This was in Fall 2020 and her private school (and, TBF, the New Orleans Public Schools as a whole) was following the science at the time and requiring masking, cohorting, etc., and, when public health conditions demanded even greater social distancing, her school prioritized the youngest students (below 5th grade) for in-person learning, because 1. they were at that time the least likely to catch or spread COVID, 2. they were the least likely to have complications if they did, 3. they were the least likely to be able to get something out of temporary Zoom school, 4. they were the ones that legally could not be left home alone while their parents worked. (Louisiana has a tuition voucher program for low-income kids who would otherwise be sent to failing public schools, and a large number of students at my daughter's school are on that, so there were a LOT of parents who were essential workers.) They ended up with very few quarantines and class shutdowns.
Anyway, when it came time for kindergarten, the original plan was to switch her to public school so as not to pay tuition, but by then I'd had another baby and needed to schedule day care in addition to this, the pandemic was still raging, and when I started looking at the public schools, there were endless half-days, and early-dismissal days, and teacher-development days, and aftercare didn't begin until the 4th week of school and wasn't guaranteed, or "we're offering virtual aftercare!" (WTF is the point of that?), etc. And when I considered all the costs of paying for ad hoc childcare, it was going to be at least half the cost of tuition, plus all of my sanity?
So she remains at the private Lutheran school, where the place is run like a well-oiled machine, where they trust the teachers to teach without having to make them do much of their professional development during the school year itself (they have about a week of those days at the beginning and end of the year), where they have one day off in the fall for parent-teacher conferences and a half-day off in the spring for parent-teacher conferences for students in danger of failing, where they publish the schedule of breaks at the beginning of the year, and unless there's an absolute dire emergency they STICK TO IT. And the teachers, who are all certified, stay there for YEARS and sometimes DECADES even though they could all easily get jobs that pay more in the public system and, demographically, are working with the same kids who make up the average student body at the public schools here (mostly working class, mostly POC, a handful of white kids).
(Literally, last year, their kindergarten teacher suddenly DIED with a week to go in the school year. She'd been working there for 30 or so years. Her funeral was in the attached church. NO ONE would have batted an eye if they'd cancelled school for a day, but they didn't. They scheduled the funeral around the usual lunch and recess hour, put out a call for two parent volunteers per classroom to supervise for an hour so the teachers and staff could attend the funeral, allowed any parent who wanted to check their kid out and take them to the funeral to do so--I did with my daughter, and they kept on moving along with the math and English lessons.)
About a year back, I was asked to come in as a parent spokesperson and talk with the Lutheran schools' accrediting board and one of the questions they asked me was "How does this school support and promote the family lives of its students?" and I blurted out "THEY ARE OPEN AND THEY STAY OPEN."
I’ll be honest and say that I hate them, and also I don’t want the school year to change so that my kids are mirroring our shackled work lives even earlier and jobs at schools are even more difficult and challenging, I’d like the work schedule to shift to look more like the school schedule 😆
This is our final day of what feels like one million half days (but which the calendar tells me is the third consecutive one). It is the absolute worst. It absolutely feels political.
Same boat over here! It's bananas. Ours is also extra complicated because we had a teacher's strike that extended the school year. But in the course of the strike, I did learn that the half days "count" to help schools fulfill the mandate of number of school days. In other words, half days are a way for schools to meet legal mandates for number of school days per years even when the resources aren't available (e.g. air conditioning on a hot day, or the need for teacher training when teacher's regular work days are committed to teaching).
I appreciate the schools' dilemma but will admit that there is some piece of checking the box on a legal mandate of days by doing these two hour school days irks me. At times, efforts to check that box trumps the goal of educating kids. And yes, it also drives me nuts as a working parent!
Thankfully the school my youngest is in has after school care until 6 on all but the first and last day of school, whether it's an early dismissal or not. There are even a couple of places that offer drop-in or single day camps to cover the time before most camps are open, though it's pricey.
Right there with you and can we also discuss the ridiculousness of the school year ending at 11:15am on Tuesday and yet none of the camps start till the following week. 5 hours of school over 2 days does not count as a week! It’s barely one full work day!
Oh god, yes. Again: WHY
YES. Also I swear that I remember my school year being shortened by a day or two if we didn't use all the planned snow days...but my kids' school keeps the same ending day and just has an extra long weekend here and there in April and May. At this point in June I'd rather just have more days with 0 school than planning around 2 hours of school 😅
Yup - we gained a day off after Memorial Day weekend because we hadn't used all the snow days...
I already know that school STARTS in aug with a half day.
noooooo
This is so disorienting. We got out of school almost a month ago. It’s always the Thursday before Memorial Day. When do your kids go back? But no, we don’t have half days ever. (North Dakota) It would be incredibly frustrating. Finding care on snow days is hard enough.
Yeah.... we get out LATE! They go back to school just after Labor Day. You?
I live on the east coast and have a lot of family and friends in the Midwest and it seems like our kids are always offset by a full month! We go from the Wednesday after labor day to late June.
I think this is partly about history and weather, and partly about how many mid-year breaks there are. I grew up in Minnesota, where my grade school (and most schools in the state) started the day after Labor Day, and finished in early June. My high school started a week earlier and I was *deeply* offended. Out in California, the spread is longer, with schools starting anywhere from mid to late August, and mostly ending in early June, but there's also an entire extra week off of school in February, which is technically called "February break" but is functionally called "ski break" by a plethora of bougie families who like to drive to Tahoe or wherever and can't wait until spring break because it might be too warm for snow by then.
California is weird.
We also get a week off in February here in New York! Weird.
Well, I don't know why New York does a February break, but having a post-Labor Day start and an extra week of vacation compared to the Midwest would certainly explain why school isn't getting out until late June!
They’re called minimum days here and I hate them. Twice a year for parent conferences and twice a month for teacher in service days. I don’t begrudge teachers the time at all. I super hate the extra hours I have to figure out how to fill.
As a parent, I hear ya! Half days almost always come with arguments over which parents work day is more crucial than the others... As a school board member, I know there are reasons involving draconian rules regarding how many professional development days are required vs how many student days are required and the nonsensical way they are counted. I do suggest attending a board meeting and voicing your issues! I try my best to bring it up as well, but it's not always heard.
AAAARRRGGGGHHHH. I feel your pain. Here in Switzerland (where the school year ends in July and restarts mid-August, making summer programs more or less obsolete) we have just survived the period of ‘no 5 day weeks.’
May is peppered with various holidays— in my Catholic canton, several religious ones that fall on a Thursday so that means Friday is also free. It is completely mad. When the kiddos go back to a five-day week in June (with another 5-6 weeks left in the school year), no one wants to do anything anymore.
This includes the teachers, who cancel classes with abandon and plan ‘project days’ whose hours do not coincide with regular school days.
In case you were wondering: this society more or less encourages women to stay home after becoming mothers. Working a mini-job is socially permissible. As long as someone is available to cook a hot lunch during the 1.5 hour lunch breaks. (School cafeteria? nonsense. Tenth grade and up, only.)
I remember your comment on the Spirit day thread. It's BONKERS to me that the culture there is so backwards. I'm so sorry!
i hear this. ohhhhhh do i!
in seattle every wednesday the kids got out of school early and it was hard. i felt like it was hard to get a flow going.
We also have early dismissal Wednesdays for “teacher collaboration“ here in Southeast Missouri. It’s been the case for about five years now, so I guess I’m used to it, and my kids don’t require childcare anymore, but it was enraging for a while.
wait. EVERY Wednesday????
yeeeep
For us here in Missouri, it's just about 45 minutes earlier than usual. Before we started the every-Wednesday thing, it was about once a month they'd dismiss at about noon or so on a Friday for teacher collaboration. Then someone decided it should be every week, and it stuck.
Increasingly common here in Massachusetts, too, but it's just like 30-45 minutes earlier. We're going to have that next year as part of a move to an overall longer school day: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday will all be half an hour longer than our current schedule. Wednesday will be the same length as our current schedule but shifted 10 minutes earlier, since overall school will be starting 10 minutes earlier every day, which is fan-freaking-tastic for the people whose kids go to schools that already started at 7:55 and especially great for kids who take buses where they're expected to be ready and waiting 20 minutes ahead of the scheduled bus time. Obviously a schedule made by extremely smart people with the welfare of the students at the top of the agenda.
seattle early release weds is an hour 15 min earlier, ouch
As I ask my children, do you want an answer or do you want sympathy?
1. Days over a certain cutoff count toward the minimums required for federal funding.
2. They're required by teachers unions in some locations.
3. They ensure that part time staff like cafe workers and bus drivers have work and get paid.
4. They provide breakfast and lunch to children who depend on the school for those services. This one went a long way in making me more tolerant of half days, knowing these meals are critical for many of my neighbors.
5. In my system, the after-school program is available from dismissal through end of day, so if you really need to you can still have inexpensive childcare.
We have a lot of very early dismissal days here in Missouri, too, but they don’t offer childcare afterwards and they don’t serve lunch! And this is true despite the fact that every single student in the district gets free breakfast and lunch through a federal program. We have early dismissal (by about 45 minutes) every single Wednesday for “teacher collaboration.” I’m pretty sure our early dismissal days are to get the required number of education days and teacher workdays in. Our district only recently started offering afterschool care for elementary students, so I’m hoping that they will be able to expand that program to include early dismissal days soon.
Thank you for sharing the rationale! This is really helpful to know. I don't think our school provides lunch to anyone on half days though. But breakfast, yes.
So, in our schools in Maryland, half days exist because our State law requires a kids to be in school a certain number of hours PLUS a certain number of days each year and at the same time the teacher contract requires a certain number of hours for them to get work done at the end of each quarter. So, they can’t have one full day to get the work done instead of 3 half days because the kids have to have a certain number of DAYS in school. If it was just an hours requirement then they could flex it however they wanted. It’s ridiculous. Our superintendent has tried to get our State legislature to change it for two years now. And twice it has been caught up in committee for nonsensical reasons. It’s maddening.
That sounds needlessly complicated! Yikes!
Whoa, fascinating. I suspect some of that happens here in NY, too.
The days vs. hours thing is kind of like how as far as I can tell, days my kid gets sent home sick from school do not count toward measures of chronic absenteeism, even if he only makes it an hour or two into the day.
OMG don't get me started. It really felt like we could count on one hand the number of actual full weeks of school my daughter had this year, our first with the public school system. Every month on a Weds there is an early release day for professional development; both Friday and Monday off for Labor Day; all possible election days are off; 2 days off for fall break in Oct; Weds before Thanksgiving is also off, then the usual end of year/new years break (which is fine); 2 days off for midwinter break in Feb; a week off for spring break in March. And then the last day of school was also an early release day, but earlier than usual which just felt pointless. What do I do? Haha - we parents complain amongst ourselves, I understand I'm not getting much done in the afternoon of an early release day so try to not schedule any meetings, and we tried out a number of different camps during the breaks which we were fortunate to have options for in our area. But I don't think the camp thing is going to work in the future since my daughter didn't like the ones that actually are available during most of the breaks. It's overall such an annoyance to have to figure out (and pay for!) all the extra care needed.
It's so hard!
For what it's worth, most private schools seem to have fewer days of school than public schools. (My mom always says the more you pay for school, the less your kid goes there.) Our neighbor kids who go to private school have been out for two weeks already and had longer winter break and had the same spring break and had a few random other days off.
Interesting. I recently talked with a parent friend who has children in a local private school and she much preferred the private school schedule since they didn't have early release days. As much I dislike the random days off, I feel it's very important to support public schools and attend our neighborhood school.
Interesting. I've found that private schools here (I'm in New Orleans) go the same number of days as the public, though possibly on a slightly different schedule (different start/end days, different breaks, etc.)
My kid's (private) school calendar is generally 179 days plus a few built-in hurricane days.
I'm pretty sure Louisiana also requires a certain number of hours/minutes in addition to or instead of days in certain circumstances, because a couple years ago when schools were closed for weeks on end due to the aftermath of Hurricane Ida and we'd burned through the hurricane days built into the schedule, a lot of schools decided to just add 20 minutes or so to the end of the school day every day for a few months to make it up rather than have to stay in session well into June (we're usually done by Memorial Day and go back in early August).
I have always heard of these half days in the States! (I'm in Canada). We don't do that here (at least not in my province). It boggles my mind. I can't fathom a reason for it. If it's because of teacher exhaustion, just put on a movie for the afternoon or something! Parents aren't expecting any real learning to happen at this time of year. Best of luck to parents dealing with this! Hang in there!
Wanna know the biggest reason why my kid is in a private Lutheran school that has no frills or fancy anything (we're Catholic)? Because they STAY OPEN ON A REGULAR SCHEDULE.
We sent her there for PK4 because we couldn't get a public PK seat for her (those aren't guaranteed in Louisiana unless you're low-income or have an IEP; in New Orleans, which has been pretty much all-charter since Katrina, if you get a public PK4 seat and aren't low income or with an IEP, you have to pay about $5K tuition for it, and not all public schools even offer PK4...free K-12 is obviously guaranteed for everyone...it's a complicated algorithm for how you get matched to a seat in a public school here but honestly it's probably the closest thing to fair as we can get, but that's another story).
This was in Fall 2020 and her private school (and, TBF, the New Orleans Public Schools as a whole) was following the science at the time and requiring masking, cohorting, etc., and, when public health conditions demanded even greater social distancing, her school prioritized the youngest students (below 5th grade) for in-person learning, because 1. they were at that time the least likely to catch or spread COVID, 2. they were the least likely to have complications if they did, 3. they were the least likely to be able to get something out of temporary Zoom school, 4. they were the ones that legally could not be left home alone while their parents worked. (Louisiana has a tuition voucher program for low-income kids who would otherwise be sent to failing public schools, and a large number of students at my daughter's school are on that, so there were a LOT of parents who were essential workers.) They ended up with very few quarantines and class shutdowns.
Anyway, when it came time for kindergarten, the original plan was to switch her to public school so as not to pay tuition, but by then I'd had another baby and needed to schedule day care in addition to this, the pandemic was still raging, and when I started looking at the public schools, there were endless half-days, and early-dismissal days, and teacher-development days, and aftercare didn't begin until the 4th week of school and wasn't guaranteed, or "we're offering virtual aftercare!" (WTF is the point of that?), etc. And when I considered all the costs of paying for ad hoc childcare, it was going to be at least half the cost of tuition, plus all of my sanity?
So she remains at the private Lutheran school, where the place is run like a well-oiled machine, where they trust the teachers to teach without having to make them do much of their professional development during the school year itself (they have about a week of those days at the beginning and end of the year), where they have one day off in the fall for parent-teacher conferences and a half-day off in the spring for parent-teacher conferences for students in danger of failing, where they publish the schedule of breaks at the beginning of the year, and unless there's an absolute dire emergency they STICK TO IT. And the teachers, who are all certified, stay there for YEARS and sometimes DECADES even though they could all easily get jobs that pay more in the public system and, demographically, are working with the same kids who make up the average student body at the public schools here (mostly working class, mostly POC, a handful of white kids).
(Literally, last year, their kindergarten teacher suddenly DIED with a week to go in the school year. She'd been working there for 30 or so years. Her funeral was in the attached church. NO ONE would have batted an eye if they'd cancelled school for a day, but they didn't. They scheduled the funeral around the usual lunch and recess hour, put out a call for two parent volunteers per classroom to supervise for an hour so the teachers and staff could attend the funeral, allowed any parent who wanted to check their kid out and take them to the funeral to do so--I did with my daughter, and they kept on moving along with the math and English lessons.)
About a year back, I was asked to come in as a parent spokesperson and talk with the Lutheran schools' accrediting board and one of the questions they asked me was "How does this school support and promote the family lives of its students?" and I blurted out "THEY ARE OPEN AND THEY STAY OPEN."
Our last day of school was May 24th. Welcome to summer, friends.
Our last day of school was May 23rd. Next week, we start the downhill slide to back to school. Meet the teacher is July 22!
whaaaaaat
I’ll be honest and say that I hate them, and also I don’t want the school year to change so that my kids are mirroring our shackled work lives even earlier and jobs at schools are even more difficult and challenging, I’d like the work schedule to shift to look more like the school schedule 😆
This is our final day of what feels like one million half days (but which the calendar tells me is the third consecutive one). It is the absolute worst. It absolutely feels political.
Same boat over here! It's bananas. Ours is also extra complicated because we had a teacher's strike that extended the school year. But in the course of the strike, I did learn that the half days "count" to help schools fulfill the mandate of number of school days. In other words, half days are a way for schools to meet legal mandates for number of school days per years even when the resources aren't available (e.g. air conditioning on a hot day, or the need for teacher training when teacher's regular work days are committed to teaching).
I appreciate the schools' dilemma but will admit that there is some piece of checking the box on a legal mandate of days by doing these two hour school days irks me. At times, efforts to check that box trumps the goal of educating kids. And yes, it also drives me nuts as a working parent!
Thankfully the school my youngest is in has after school care until 6 on all but the first and last day of school, whether it's an early dismissal or not. There are even a couple of places that offer drop-in or single day camps to cover the time before most camps are open, though it's pricey.
Otherwise, I would probably go mad.