For success of five-day school week

Dear editor,

I read a June 16 editorial, “Five-day school week.” As a teacher, I welcome the new school week plan.

However, there are too many problems to be solved. The editorial stated if the system was in full swing, a possible increase in private tutoring may ramp up parents’ financial burden, while disrupting classroom education further. In order to tackle this problem, school can develop various extracurricular programs on Saturdays and Sundays.

Even though it is quite a reasonable solution, I ’m wondering who takes charge of those all kinds of extracurricular programs on weekends. Does the government make teachers come to school on every weekend to cover the programs?

Do we teachers have to provide extra interesting and meaningful afterschool programs? Does the government have enough human resources to cover the weekend programs? Maybe they can put substitutes into the programs, but can the substitutes control students who they don’t know well? I don’t think so.

In this situation, the implementation of the five-day school week can simply cause more concerns, I think. Besides, students and teachers can feel more tired on weekdays because of increasing class hours a day. I really don’t want to work extra at school on every weekend.

I’m a mother of two children. I need time to spend with my lovely family. Although this concern may be too extreme, I’m worried that more time can give some mischievous teens more chance to commit juvenile delinquency. We need to make thorough preparations for the successful implementation of the shortened school week.

Park Mi-ra

Suwon, Gyeonggi Province