Senior skip days are a tradition where members of the senior class pre-arrange a day to skip school to spend time with their friends or participate in a fun activity. They typically come around holidays or big school events like prom. Some of these activities include going to trampoline parks, beaches, or even amusement parks.
Many seniors at Jefferson chose to skip school on Monday, Nov. 10, in order to extend their weekend with Veteran’s Day being on Tuesday. This gave the seniors a four-day weekend.
“I think having social cohesion among the senior class is desirable,” history teacher Ilsa Trigoboff said. “I like the idea of senior sunrise. I know in previous years they’ve had freshman lock-ins or overnights to build social cohesion. I also think that there’s something to having free time. Adults also take personal days. Students don’t have the right to take personal days. It’s sort of like claiming that adult privilege as their own.”
Teachers and students have varied opinions on the impact of skip days. The effects of the senior skip day forced Trigoboff to rearrange her lesson plans for introducing the new unit. Meanwhile, senior Justin Kim got to reap the benefits.
“I [slept until about] 12 p.m. and worked on college applications,” Kim said. “Then, I went on a bike ride, which I haven’t done in a while.”
Kim took advantage of his extra day off, though senior skip days can be inconvenient for teachers. Trigoboff sees them as one of the tradeoffs of being a high school teacher. There are many ways that they can take away from the high school experience, but they can be equally as rewarding.
“I think that there are things that come with being a high school teacher that are sometimes less exciting for teachers, like senior skip days, but they’re also things that are more exciting, like, you get to spirit bomb.” Trigoboff said. “You get to do spirit days, you get to see students at pep rallies. You get to attend students’ games and see them thrive in their own environments.”
One part of the high school experience is being able to learn. This is one part of the experience that was lost on Monday, as it wasn’t a day when content wasn’t being covered.
“I think obviously [missing a lecture] differs based on the subject,” Trigoboff said. “For me, what I think is the most disruptive [thing] is that I have to figure out how I am going to adjust all of my lessons in the future, which I’ve planned out through the end of December.”
However, many other students didn’t suffer from this loss. Plenty of students didn’t miss much content or had assignments that were easy to make up.
“Three of my four classes were study halls that day,” Kim said. “One class I could do using online videos, so I didn’t miss a lot of content.”
Senior skip days can be seen as typically unproductive, though there are ways that they can be done that make them less problematic for the teachers and administrators. Trigoboff believes that there are multiple ways to make them less disruptive.
“If the senior skip day had been on an anchor day, for example, where each class is only missing 30 minutes of content, I think those are less problematic, I also think that it’s helpful to teachers to announce it in advance.” Trigoboff said. “As a teacher of government, I think that it would be a great thing to [skip and] go to the Fairfax County courthouse and observe the court, or get together and participate in a protest. Having some kind of an option where we’re taking advantage of this thing, which is maybe a minor inconvenience and we’re turning it into an opportunity for bonding or enrichment, I think that would be a nice thing to do.”