Tuesday will be the first of several “wellness days” that have replaced spring break in 2021.

Eastern’s faculty made the decision not to have a spring break in hopes that keeping students on campus will help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Having individual days off instead of an entire week should stop students from going on out-of-state spring break vacations as well.

Other schools in Illinois also canceled spring break, but they chose different alternatives.

University at Illinois in Urbana-Champaign started the semester a week late and gave students three days off throughout the semester.

Northern Illinois University will end the semester a week early.

Western Illinois University will only be giving students two days off from classes.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses canceled spring break altogether.

While Eastern will still technically have the same amount of time off of school, some students aren’t happy with the arrangement.

With the wellness days in the middle of the week, many students won’t actually get a day off from homework.

Emilie Bowman, a sophomore English education major, said she didn’t think that wellness days are an effective way to give students time to rest.

“I get why the university is doing personal wellness days but we as students are still going to be doing work on those days,” Bowman said. “Even though we’re getting a break from actual classes, we aren’t getting a break from the actual workload which is the problem.”

Kamauri King, a freshman psychology major, said she would’ve preferred a whole week off.

“I personally feel like the wellness day should have been turned into a wellness week because what does a random day off from school do besides mess with our class schedule? It would mess things up because now our teaches have to pause instruction and lessons for a day just to pick it up the next day when we can just have the week off,” King said. “It does offer us time off from school, but I think it would be more effective if we were a given wellness week to just catch up, relax, and properly social distance.”

Bowman said that having the day off at the beginning or end of the week would be preferable.

“I feel like long weekends, maybe like three days, would be nice,” Bowman said. “They should’ve just shortened the entire semester by a week. It would be stressful, but right now we aren’t really getting a break anyway.”

King said that she felt they shouldn’t have changed the schedule in the first place.

“I feel like taking away our spring break was unnecessary because we are in the middle of a pandemic so the week off could have been used to clean and sanitize the campus,” King said.

There will be no class meetings or homework due on Tuesday.

Luke Taylor can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].