Student Petition to Lighten Homework Load Grabs Attention of APS

High school students in Arlington Public Schools say they are getting too many assignments and not enough time to do them during virtual learning.

More than 3,000 students and parents have signed a Change.org petition asking Arlington Public Schools to adhere to its high school homework “expectations,” as stated online.

Students are encouraged to engage in nightly independent reading of their choice. Beyond that, no additional assignments/homework will be required outside of the expectations for asynchronous work that is part of students’ daily class time, or the 30 minutes per subject of asynchronous work assigned for Mondays.

​The volume of signatures caught the attention of the school system. The petition was the first time staff were notified that these concerns are shared by more than just a few students, said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.

“We take the feedback we receive via a variety of formats seriously,” he said. “All of our high school principals are aware and are meeting with teachers to examine the number of assignments being given and to reduce them where applicable.”

Principals are working at the subject level with instructional supervisors to come up with solutions that reduce the workload on students, he said.

Bellavia said the homework policy that the petitioners are referencing is not policy, but rather, it is guidance for secondary teachers. According to the guidance, teachers of college-level classes may need to assign more work to cover the breadth of their curricula.

One student told ARLnow that for the most part, the types of assignments and the volume are about the same, with the caveat that some teachers are assigning hours of video content.

“I probably spend… three hours a week watching videos for those classes, and I have three or four classes that assign videos,” he said.

That amounts to three to 12 hours a week of videos. For this student — who is taking all college-level classes and admits that more work comes with the territory — the workload did not motivate him to sign the petition.

“The homework itself doesn’t bother me,” he said. “It’s more that there was a policy made and they’re not following it.”

Despite the breakdown he sees between the school system’s expectations for assignments and the reality of distance learning, he commended his teachers for how they have adapted to online-only learning.

“Students like to give them flak, but from an objective standpoint, they’re doing pretty well,” he said.

Another student said, as a reason for signing the petition, that she has been working “15 hours every single day (8 a.m. 10 p.m.) non-stop ever since the beginning of school.”

She added that there are too many assignments and not enough asynchronous time in which to complete them.

“We shouldn’t be getting that much work especially in a learning environment that we aren’t familiar with,” she said. “It’s not because of poor time management, it’s because of so much work we are getting.”

In the petitions’ comments, parents also threw in their support, saying they have watched their students lose lunch hours to additional instruction and devote entire weekends to homework.