Thanksgiving weekend just went by and students didn’t get assigned any homework from Thursday to Sunday due to Wellness Weekend. 

For those who don’t know, Wellness Weekends mean that “…students do not have any obligations to the school district, which means no homework, no tests or quizzes, and no due dates scheduled directly before or after a wellness weekend.” says Superintendent Mark Toback, Ed.D. in a letter uploaded to the Wayne Township Public Schools Homepage. 

This school year,  Wellness Weekends are enforced three times, once per every marking period (not including the first marking period). The scattered dates of these no-homework-filled-weekends are on November 24-28 (which just happened), February 18-21, and May 27-30. 

News12 Long Island also commented about Wellness weekends in a 42 second clip titled, “Wait what, no homework? Wellness Weekends return in Wayne.” This informational segment included information about what Wellness Weekends are and even interviewed a Wayne Valley student about their opinion.

It is always appreciated when districts give kids a break with their work, and Freshman Emilia Caruso said, “I am so thankful for the Wellness Weekends we do have, but everyone is always so stressed out from all of this school work, and I think we deserve more than we are given.”

Even though Wellness Weekend has a good message behind the gesture, it also didn’t help a few students in the long run. A freshman at Hills, Cassandra Rietema, said that, “The policy was that no one would get assigned homework on Wednesday night that would be due over the weekend, but teachers somehow found, like, a loophole. In math class on Wednesday, our class did a Math XL [online math assignment] and if we didn’t finish we would have to finish it later. To me, that counts as homework because of course I didn’t finish in the period in time and had to complete the assignment later that night which was still part of Thanksgiving Weekend.”

Besides that, there haven’t any problems with Wellness Weekends so far, so us as students should just wait until the next ones come and appreciate the breaks we get.