The University of Waterloo’s Federation of Students (FEDS) held a referendum earlier this month to gauge student interest in a fall reading week as well as discuss the implications the break would have on scheduling of the school year.
According to Danielle Burt, president of FEDS, a motion was passed to advocate for a fall reading week and run a referendum to judge student interest.
The university took the suggestion for the fall break, presented it to the school senate, and created a task force to create a report with recommendations on the best way to implement a fall break.
Burt said, “their recommendation was to shorten orientation week by two days, and so we framed our question [for the referendum] to be to start classes on the Thursday after Labour Day, because usually the week after Labour Day is orientation week.”
Burt continued, “those two days would be allocated to a fall break somewhere in the term. The optimal choice from the report was Thanksgiving weekend.”
Around 6,000 Univerisity of Waterloo (U of W) students voted in the referendum, according to Burt.
“73.8 per cent of students who voted were in favour of the question, ‘Should classes start on the Thursday after Labour Day to accommodate for a fall break during the term?’” Burt said.
Despite this support from the student body for a fall break, U of W faces some difficulties with introducing a fall reading week.
Because Labour Day comes so late in September 2015, the fall term is already shortened.
“The university has committed to us that 2015 is highly unlikely, and then 2016 is the goal,” Burt said.
Another issue is U of W’s co-op program. It will be difficult to schedule a reading week that works with the program’s schedule.
Nick Manning, director of media relations at U of W, said, “there is a lot of pressure on the schedule of the University of Waterloo to fit in all of the mandatory elements that we need to fit in during that fall term.”
“It’s not just [a] first-year scheduling challenge. We may have students who have taken consecutive work terms and are taking classes in their second, third, or fourth year in that fall term ‘out of sequence’ with normal university scheduling,” Manning said.
“There are a lot of different tracks of programs that co-op students in particular may be on, but making sure that there’s enough time in the school calendar to fit in all of the mandatory academic programming; that is what the challenge is that we face,” he said.
Manning said the university recognizes the fall term can be stressful for many students, and said they are willing to do the work to make a fall reading break possible.
“We really do recognize that it’s a pressure cooker environment. The mental well-being and mental health of our campus community . . . is something that’s top-of-mind as we go into this,” he said.
“We recognize that given the stressful nature of that fall term that students would appreciate a break of some nature, that’s what they told us in their referendum, and that’s why we’re pushing forward,” Manning said.
