“Why don’t we have [Holiday X] off?”

There are several considerations in assembling an academic calendar in an Orthodox Christian school.

First and foremost, families must honor the fasts and Great Feasts of the Church. The Academy should support families in this.

Secondly, families have diverse gifts, needs, and capacities. The Academy should understand this and support each family, as far as possible.

Thirdly, parents are primarily responsible for their children’s upbringing, their family culture. The Academy teachers operate in loco parentis, helping parents fulfill this sacred role, while prioritizing the place of family cohesion within our broader community.

With these considerations in mind, we have adopted the following approach to vacation days and feast days.

1. Great Feasts of the Church (Feasts of Christ and Feasts of the Theotokos) are observed with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. While some families have a robust practice of observing the Great Feasts, not every family who sends their children has the same family culture.

• Some families have a parent working in the school,
• some families have one parent at home, and others have both parents working outside of the home.

It is the policy of the Academy to host a community day on Great Feast Days for our students. Students are welcome on campus just as a regular school day, but we will attend the Divine Liturgy together and spend the a half in fellowship–feasting, creating, and recreating.

Great Feasts become instructional days, rather than strictly academic; we focus on creating works of art which honor the feast, assignments and discussion that encourage understanding the feast, and recreation that fosters school spirit.

1. Certain federal observances will be given as days off, focusing especially on long weekends, in order to allow leisure time for families. In this way, families with various work and financial needs can better be accommodated and reduce the strain on the employed parent(s) paid time off options or the family’s finances.

Pedagogically, this allows the Academy to also develop a specifically Orthodox Christian culture around certain feast day observances. We mostly keep Christmas and Pascha in similar ways, but how ought we to spend Annunciation? The Nativity of the Theotokos? How can we honor Christ and His Mother within the community? By modeling celebration of these feasts, we set the example and our students can be formed in a deeper way to participate in the life of the Orthodox Church.

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