On May 28, Missouri House Bill 280 was made law. This bill is supposed to let kids have more summer fun, but instead it’s just helping businesses at the Lake of the Ozarks. 

  The bill is making it so schools cannot go back to school until 14 days before Labor Day, which means Aug. 24 is the first day we can go back next school year. 

  The Missouri General Assembly passed this bill for students to get one more weekend of fun at the lake or to do other things kids do during the summer. The Lake of the Ozark Representative, Jay Houghton, came up with the idea for this bill to get more business on Labor Day weekend. I don’t think people understand that  some summer business will be taken if school ends in June.

  School will be going into the first week or two of June depending on snow days that happen during the school year. This will make it so we have to go into June and personally I don’t want that. 

  This coming summer will be a long summer, so people think that this will be a good change, but then after that, it goes back to being the same length just later in June to late August. This is making it so we don’t get as much time in June depending on the calendar committee’s decision.

  According to District Superintendent, Jason Sefrit, the calendar committee will try and make sure we don’t go too far into the summer, but what about Christmas break? If we go back to school later in August, which means Christmas break will most likely happen before first semester finals, if that’s how the committee gets the break set. If that happens, we go back to school for a couple of weeks and then finals will take place. That doesn’t sound fun to me to have a break in the middle of the last weeks of the semester when you are starting to study for finals.

  I don’t think this is the best option for us because we still have to go the same amount of hours in a school year and we will be getting the same amount of days in the summer.