I may be able to help clarify the reasoning behind not wanting students to travel the week before testing because my district does the same thing.
If you have never seen the questions on the STAAR exams the majority of them are application based. Students have to figure out what the question is asking, weed out the extraneous information, and then determine how to find the answer. This is part of the reason the state decided to drop the number of required tests from 15 to 5 (that and we were spending almost 9 weeks of the school year testing). Add to this that STAAR results can prevent a student from graduating. You can understand why districts take STAAR so seriously.
During the week prior to testing classes spend the majority of the time doing refresher work. Some of the material on the test is covered at the beginning of the semester and teenagers (no offense
) have an incredibly short attention span. Students who take modified tests (for dyslexia, special needs etc.) are pulled out of class and participate in small-group or one-on-one tutoring. This really isn't much different than colleges who have 'dead week' prior to final exams. While no one on your team may meet any of the criteria it is much easier for the district/campus to create a blanket rule and enforce it across the board for all students rather than make exceptions here and there. Exceptions can set a bad precedence if they are not careful.
As far as Easter competition...the only regional my team has ever participated in (we really need to branch out
) has been Lone Star and this is the first time in what seems like years when it wasn't on Easter or Spring Break and you have
no idea how happy I am about it!
