Feeling a little frenzied this semester and thinking it would be nice to have a mid-semester fall break like the spring? Don’t bet on it, Iowa State officials say.

Other schools have a mid-semester break from classes during the fall, said Edwin Lewis, an ISU assistant provost, but ISU is reluctant to adapt a similar policy.

“We’ve talked about it, but we haven’t figured out how to do it without going below the total number of hours we’re expected to have in the fall semester,” Lewis said. “Right now we have 74 school days in the fall semester. If we cut down below that, the Board of Regents probably wouldn’t be willing to agree with it.”

The spring semester is also 74 days long, but the break is placed after the first eight weeks of the semester. In the fall, there is no extended break for 13 weeks — until Thanksgiving.

“The stretch from Labor Day until Thanksgiving is a long one,” Lewis said, “and we would like to find a way to do something about that.”

The problem, he said, is that students and faculty wouldn’t want to start any earlier, or finish any closer to Christmas.

“In terms of parameters, you can’t extend the semester either way, so the only flexibility would be the two days before Thanksgiving,” Lewis said.

He said students could request a change in the schedule, but they might not like what they get.

“At one time we had one day off around Homecoming, and then went Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week,” Lewis said. “The problem was that students would take off that weekend before Thanksgiving, so teachers would enforce attendance by giving tests, and everybody was upset. We finally gave up trying to hold classes that week.”

But at least one ISU student would be in favor of making a few sacrifices for a fall break.

“It would be great, especially around midterms when it’s really hectic,” said Nicole Kyle, a senior in journalism mass communication. “You need a break to catch your breath and relax a little bit.”

Lewis did say, however, that a mid-semester fall break is not an impossibility.

“The best way to go to request a change is through the student representation on the calendar committee,” he said. “We’re working on the 1999 calendar now, so big changes would be a problem. We can make small changes up to a point, but frankly the students would have to come in with a proposal of what they want to trade off for them.”