Kerre Woodham: Why aren't all schools back yet?

It is the end of the month. There's only 12 of them in a year. Into the first month of the year and still there are schools that are not back yet. Could someone please explain to me how it is reasonable in this day and age to have such disparate and wide-ranging start dates for the school year?  

I don't know about your particular school, or your area, but of the ones I know about, Auckland Grammar borders have been back for two weeks. That seems perfectly reasonable. Mount Albert borders have been back one night, one day, and now they're off for the weekend. Another college, one of our colleagues has a son at that college, they're not opening the gates till the 10th of February. The 10th of February. Some primary schools started back this week, our kids start back next week. But then of course, there's Waitangi Day in the middle, so that's a bit disruptive.  

No slight against the teachers. I've been helping out a bit with pickups and childminding and whenever I've gone into school to pick up the kids from their holiday programme, teachers are there getting their classrooms ready for the school year and prepping and doing what they do. But why on Earth hasn't the school year started? Why are we still prepping for a school year that is now one month gone? Most kids that I've spoken to, of numerous ages, are desperate to get back to see their mates, to learn new stuff, to play sport, to have some routine.  

And a lot of parents are coming to the end of their respective tethers too. The days of mum and dad disappearing with the family to the batch over Christmas and then mum and the kids staying down there for weeks on end, being oiled up with suntan oil and put out to fry in the sun while mum read the Jilly Cooper’s. Dad, going to work Monday to Friday, then coming back on Friday and you could hear Dad coming from miles away because they'd be towing the trailer with the Swappa Crates in the back, and they'd be clanking their way down the driveway. Those days are long gone. I'm sure some families still do that, but for most families, you have to work.  

For a lot of parents, the pay packets from the first few weeks back at work goes straight to the holiday programmes that the kids are enrolled into so parents can keep their jobs. And as for the poor parents with children at primary, intermediate, and secondary, it is absolutely impossible. There must be a really good reason, she said optimistically and perhaps naively, there must be a really good reason why school start dates are so disparate, random and arbitrary. But for the life of me, I don't know what that good reason would be.  

Do you think while the government is focused on revamping our education system and bringing some form of uniformity to what is taught and how it is taught so that it's not so random, depending on which school you go to and which part of the country, do you think while they're at it, they should be looking at standardising the start of the school year as well? I certainly do. 

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