Special days are very useful to add a title and symbol to a day to announce something special, or to change the expected cycle-day, but it can also affect which periods and bell times your users see.

But first, let's explain how bell times work in Studyo. If you go to your CALENDAR section in management mode and hover the days of the week header on the calendar side, you should see that weekdays have at least one bell time schedule assigned (recognizable by the bell icon), while weekends have a special day named "weekend" (how appropriate).

In the example above, that "Regular" schedule is listed on the right side if you select the "Bell times" tab.

But why didn't we see "No school" over the weekend days? Why was it a special day named "weekends"? Because Studyo assigns a cycle day to each day that has bell times assigned to that day of the week. As an example, here's a calendar stripped of everything. No special day nor bell times are assigned anywhere. Not only do we see warning signs atop each day of the week, but we don't see any cycle-day. It's totally empty.

Let's assign the "Regular" bell times on Mondays, either by dragging and dropping it over the "Mon" header or clicking that header and picking it in the list. Suddenly, all Mondays have a cycle day assigned!

That's why, by default, your weekends have the "Weekend" special day assigned, not the "No school" bell times. If you inspect that "Weekend" special day closer, by clicking its pen icon, you will see how it assigns the "No school" bell times.

So, let's say we want to create an "Early dismissal" schedule and apply it to one or more days. We first go to the "Bell times" tab and either click the "+" button to create a new schedule or click the clone button on an existing one. Let's do that on the "Regular" schedule.

We're now working on a new schedule temporarily named "Regular COPY". Let's rename it more appropriately, remove the 4th and 5th periods and adjust the start of the PM period.

Once we're done, we can now create a new special day and use that schedule.

If we apply that special day on a day and save all changes, Studyo will now display that schedule to users.

You might have noticed that you can select more than one schedule in a special day, just like you can add more than one schedule over a weekday. In combination with schedule tags, this can be used to display different bell times for different grades.

You could have a regular Middle School and Upper School schedule, respectively using the "MS" and "US" schedules. Then, under the SECTIONS section (!), each of your class can define class schedules that either use "MS" or "US". Then, you could create copies of each for early dismissal and assign both to your special day. Better, you could have special days that mix an early dismissal schedule for one grade and a regular one for others.

See documentation about section schedules for more details.