Effective immediately, summer school work or reading is a thing of the past for any middle or high school courses. The move away from summer work comes as a result of the Advanced Academic Advisory Committee’s conclusion that the removal of summer assignments is the best course of action to promote positive mental health.

“The Advanced Academic Advisory Committee was asked to look into all summer assignments, including summer reading, largely due to some student feedback, including surveys that pointed to the stress and anxiety caused by work/homework loads,” Frisco ISD Director of Secondary Curriculum and Instruction Amanda Campbell said via email. “All possibilities were discussed, including continuing current practice of allowing each teacher to determine assignments in contents outside of English (where guidelines and district-wide reading selections already existed), adding this ability to English, creating guidelines for teacher-created assignments for all courses, creating district-wide assignments for courses, creating optional resources for students to study online available district-wide, allowing optional assignments to be issued, and completely discontinuing the practice of issuing summer work.”

The decision to no longer assign summer work is leading some teachers on campus to change fall lesson plans to include the material previously covered in summer assignments.  

“Normally the ecology unit was covered from the summer assignment,” AP Biology teacher Chris Ham said. “So in the past we used the summer assignment to cover the two weeks of school work, but now that we can’t give the summer assignment we’re now going to have to make time somewhere in our schedule to fit in two weeks of more content. It’s gonna make the entire class go a little bit faster than usual, but that’s just the way we’re going to have to do it.”

Junior Iris Chang is one student who believes the removal of summer homework will be beneficial for students.

“I think summer homework is a little bit of a burden for students,” Chang said. “Summer is our time to relax and not have to worry about schoolwork and most people end up doing it in the last like week or two. And so it really just loads on stress and makes people not excited to start the new year. I think the changes will have a decent impact on student mental health.”

However, Ham believes students will prefer having summer assignments to a faster paced school year.

“Personally I think students would rather do a summer assignment than having a faster paced class,” said Ham. “Because now students will have to do another set of quizzes and exams, and it will be a whole new unit that they’re going to have to study for on top of all their other classes.”