Decades before this year’s students walked the halls of PA, school always started for students in September, usually the day after Labor Day, or the first Monday of September. Now very evidently, students have made their return to school a week before the precedent starting date.
Since the late ‘90s, Virginia school systems were required to start schools after Labor Day unless granted a waiver. Then in 2019, the Virginia General Assembly passed new legislation granting all schools the ability to open 14 days before Labor Day at the earliest. But except for a group of school systems who had been granted waivers repeatedly in the past, a majority of Virginia school systems were required to close the Friday and Monday around Labor Day weekend.
The school board of VBCPS made the decision in March 2022 to set the start date of the 2023-2024 school year to August 28. The change in schedule happened to become more aligned with the starting date of a majority of schools in the state and country and to give more time for courses with AP and IB testing, according to school system officials.
Sophomore Vivian Myers was opposed to the change in start date as she claims it gave her a shorter summer. “I was kind of annoyed,” Myers explains. “I feel like our summer was super short, and people that I used to go to school with got out way before us and went to school after us.” Myers also remarks that she doesn’t really see the point of starting earlier if students were given a four-day weekend directly after the first week.
But more opposition to the early start date resonates close to home for PA. In 2019, while decisions on changing the start date were occurring in the General Assembly, Eric Terry, President of the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association, outlined to the Washington Post that Virginia Beach, along with Williamsburg and the Shenandoah Valley, would be areas of Virginia that would be affected economically by the change. According to Terry, the last two weeks of August are exceptionally important for the tourism industries in those areas, which would be harmed by an earlier school start.
Having an earlier start date for the school year means having fewer available lifeguards for the beach during the busy tourist season. Senior Catherine Vann is a lifeguard at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, where a majority of staff is made up of high school and college students. According to Vann, the time after Labor Day until September 17 is called “fall patrol” for the lifeguards, a period usually when most college and high school students have returned to school which leads to low levels of staff when the beaches can still be busy around summertime. But Vann explains that “especially this past week” has been difficult with staffing because “the high schoolers went back [to school] and ODU students went back this week so even the college kids who can work are going back to school as well.”
Even with the challenges of students starting before Labor Day, Vann explains that there are always supervisors patrolling the beach who will have eyes on the water at all times and the days off given to students around the weekend will work with the holiday.
The schedule for the 2024-25 school year has not been released by VBCPS at the time of this story’s publication.
