Polina Pelipenko | News Editor
March 27, 2026
Spring break is standing just around the corner for all high school students. It’s time made to take a break from schooling and enjoy time with family and friends. Especially in San Clemente, as the weather heats up and the UV rises, a week off of school to bum around on the beach and take a deep breath is the thing keeping students running in a non-stop March. Yet the reality of the break is much more different for students taking any AP or IB classes this semester.
The AP and IB tests for all classes are scheduled within the first week of May, meaning for many students, this spring break is much less a break from school work rather a window to take a deep dive into the review textbooks that have collected dust on their shelves for the past semester. With over 2.8 million students taking the AP exams last year, and just under 200,000 taking IB exams, the deep rooted fear of failure runs country wide.
The exams are daunting over students whose problems stem far and wide from the AP exam. On top of the exams coming up, teachers are still not easing up on assignments, especially those that are assigned the Friday before break and due the Monday right after. The break seems to be less a break for students but rather a teacher’s chance to stuff a couple more grades in the grade book before finals.
Students are already crumbling underneath the load of a 40 hour school week, sports, and other extracurricular activities–seeming to find spring break as less like a chance to catch some sun and more like time to catch up on the work they’ve fallen behind on over the past 3 months of this semester. But is one week really enough to combine studying for exams, catching up on school work, and still finding time to rest and reset for the next 2 months of the semester?
The popular vote on this stands at no, there’s just no way for a high school student to fit the school and a fun aspect of spring break into one. Junior Lucas De Smedt shards the sentiment of there being absolutely not enough time as, “between sports, school, and seeing family, [he’s] just too wiped to even experience a break.” High schoolers are not meant to be machines to just grind and digest what’s in front of them, yet that’s how it feels with a week break. Sophomore Remy Wheeler added that “[her] family is in 29 palms and [she] has to be there most of the time with no chance to actually take a break.”
Within the week of spring break, students are expected to perfect a balance that they have not even perfected in their years of schooling: learning how to have fun and still be studious. So for most high school students a week of spring break seems more like a crack to see the sun before the iron door shuts again rather than an actual break.
Leave a Reply