For the first time in years, the fall semester ends Friday, which marks the beginning of the Frisco ISD two week winter break.

“It just, expedites our time for turning in grades, and getting everything done,” geography teacher Jennifer Nelken said. “If you have a test or something that last week, and students are absent, they’re gonna probably have to come back after the break, and have it incomplete or something like that because grades will be due I think like that Tuesday or something? After the semester but we will have one day after the semester just teachers and no students where we can get stuff accomplished, so that’s helpful, too.”

The change in the school calendar has put more pressure on some students.

“I think there’s not enough time to completely finish projects that we start before break,” sophomore Thrisha Malireddey said. “If we did have break, we’d have like enough time to like, work on it more and like, improve on it.”

However, other students such as junior Daniel Nagles find the change a good thing.

“The reason I feel it’s a good thing the semester’s ending before the winter break is because we’re students, we’re human, we’re children, we’re teenagers we’re not gonna remember everything we learned over the winter break,” Nagles said. “I feel it’s a good brain break for everyone, but it ends before winter break?. Because, that means, in principle, new concepts are introduced after the winter break and not a week or two after winter break and everyone is expected to memorize what they learned before the winter break ended so it provides some safety in knowing that they don’t have to study and is also stressful for them.”

Although the semester ends on the Friday before the break, grades are not due until Jan. 7, which affects athletes’ eligibility to participate over the holiday.

“All students are eligible after the break because school’s not in, so some kids in the past have only wrestled either over Thanksgiving vacation or over Christmas vacation so the UIL rules apply up till we get out and then they start again the day we get back so if you’re failing this six weeks you’re going to be ineligible after we get back from vacation,” wrestling coach Tim Brennan said. “You will be eligible over the holidays right you can wrestle over the holidays but teams don’t normally do that because you want to put the players out there that you know you can count on.”