This petition is requesting VIS (Vienna International School) to give the IB students two days off in the next school week.

VIS has closed recently due to COVID-19 restrictions implemented by the Austrian Government. The people who suffer the most from this are IB students. Some of us are already behind on our classes and would love to have two days off later in the next week to catch up with all the work and relax at the same time. It is getting harder for us to perform well for our classes because:

1. Less physical activity (walking from class to class) at home as compared with physical activity at school. There is a positive correlation of physical activity with school performance according to this study. Therefore, less physical activity means worse school performance.

2. Studying in groups repeatedly is more efficient in learning as compared to studying during online class at home according to this study.

3. The teachers have technical difficulties to conduct the class according to recent experiences of me and other classmates. Therefore, students have less time to learn the same material because they have less class time to understand it.

4. Online School hinders teaching abilities, thus burdening students for their school work. Anonymous VIS teacher stated: "I want to return back to the classroom so I can teach better" or something along the lines of that.

Thus, the ability to do the same school work has worsened. These students are already having traumatic thoughts for the danger to their health and their family members due to COVID-19.

An argument is that students can catch up in the weekend. However due to the worsened ability of students to complete the same school work, they have much less free time in the weekend. This can be very stressful for them.

Furthermore, I would like to thank the teachers for working so hard during this period of time.

Please give us some time to catch up on material. I, and everyone signing this would be thankful to VIS.

Kind Regards,

A Grade 11 Student

Muhammad Umer