With the abundance of holiday breaks coming up this year, there will be many students who will want to go on vacations; unfortunately, this can pose a serious threat to the school and its students.

When or if students decide to go on vacation this year during their breaks, there is a chance they may come back with the very unfortunate COVID-19 virus. With this in mind, it will be sufficient and necessary for students to plan out COVID testing days or maintain social distancing whilst on vacation. Failure to do so could result in the massive spread of COVID throughout the school, infecting many students. Another solution that I have conjured up would be to have periods of days after breaks where we would online school. This would allow the school to go into a safe quarantine and ultimately, protect its students from COVID. This solution would also be a better solution than just not having school entirely, as that would mean having to make up days of school in the summer.

Many could argue that this style of precaution could not work, due to either the students or the parents to not care about taking such awareness in mind. The many common arguments that have posed to me have been as such:

• “How do we know the students will COVID test during their vacation time?”

• “How do we know students won’t take advantage of the needed days for testing and just lengthen their vacation?”

• “How do we know that students won’t lie about not going on vacation or COVID testing?”

Other schools have to take these oppositions into account and have resulted in a less enjoyable outcome for their students. Take Ohio State University, for example. They decided to completely abolish and cancel Spring Break for their students entirely. In order, keep the students happy this year, we will need to continue to the accessibility of holiday breaks.

If we decide to take my idea and consideration, without minding some tweaks to make my idea work better, then I’m sure to see ourselves going to a cleaner, COVID-19 free, school in no time, as it would:

1.) Lessen the risk of bringing COVID into our school.

2.) Protect other fellow students from the risk of catching COVID.

3.) Make it easier to track who indeed did catch COVID.

With holiday breaks continuing safely and as normally as they would go, then I could see a happier and pleasant student environment for the rest of the year and possibly the years following.