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→Statutory holidays and non-instructional days
====Statutory holidays and non-instructional days====
Make sure that statutory holidays and other non-instructional school days are taken into <span class="noglossary">account</span> when you work out a parenting schedule. Like weekends, these too are special days when the kids don't have to go to school.
Statutory holidays, like Family Day, Labour Day and Canada Day, are easy to plan for. Most of them happen at a fixed time in the year, and you can look up those that don't online. There are a lot of ways of dealing with statutory holidays. Some parents don't worry about them at all, and just follow the ordinary week-to-week schedule throughout the year, except for the main school holidays, like the spring, summer and winter breaks. Other parents share them so that one parent has a particular holiday in one year, and the other parent has the holiday in the following year. For holidays that fall on Mondays and Fridays, you could also decide that whichever parent has the kids for that weekend will also have them for the Monday or the Friday too. This is a good approach, just be aware that in some years one parent will have more statutory holidays with the kids than the other. Don't worry about it, however, because over the long run things will usually work out to a relatively even sharing of statutory holidays.
Non-instructional days, like professional development days and parent-teacher interview days, are a bit more difficult to plan for. Quite often you won't get the details about what the school's calendar looks like until a month or two before the start of school in September. However, non-instructional days magically tend to fall on Mondays and Fridays, and parents who work outside the home can't always count on being available for the children. Non-instructional days, then, raise two kinds of problems: who will have the kids for a day off school; and, how will the kids be cared for if one or both parents have to be at work.