With the hopes of getting the coronavirus under control with new vaccines, the Park Hill School District is moving forward with a calendar for the 2021-22 school year.
A draft of the calendar was presented to board members at a regular meeting on Jan. 7. Normally a calendar is presented to the board in the month of December with board members approving it in January but the entire process was pushed back by the pandemic.
Jessica Todd, Walden Middle School language arts’ teacher and chair of the calendar committee, presented the calendar to the board. Todd said committee members had lots of opportunities to go back to their buildings and community members to tweak the calendar.
The first day of school is set for Monday, Aug. 23, with the first semester ending before the winter holiday break. Since the school year got started late in 2020, Park Hill’s first semester didn’t end until last week. The last day of school next year is scheduled for May 27, 2022.
Some other key points from the calendar include maintaining a full day on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving but having a full day off on Dec. 23. Spring break will be March 14-18 with the committee trying to align it with neighboring school districts.
The committee also made an effort to make quarters more even but with some constraints, the task became harder. On the high school level the first semester is 82 days long but the second semester has a total of 95 days for a total of 177 school days in the entire year.
At the middle school and elementary level the numbers are a little different but the imbalance between the first half of the year and second half is still wide.
The biggest hurdle to getting the balance between semesters is state legislation that was enacted in 2019 that does not allow school districts to start any earlier than two weeks prior to the first Monday in September. Before, school districts could not start any earlier than 10 days before the first Monday.
The change was supposed to go into effect this school year but those plans were scratched statewide because of the pandemic but will go into effect for the upcoming school year.
Todd said getting the first semester to end before the winter break and having equal numbers of days to the semesters were in conflict.
“Because we’re starting our school year a little later in August as a result of that legislation, it makes those two things difficult,” Todd told board members.
Park Hill Superintendent Dr. Jeanette Cowherd said the district has had conversations with lawmakers about the issue and the response is wait and see.
“Well you haven’t done it yet, so you don’t know what the impact is,” Cowherd said about the response from many lawmakers when the issue was brought up before the pandemic. “Now they’re saying, ‘You still haven’t done it.’”
“You don’t have to go through it to know it’s going to impact the academic year,” board member Janice Bolin said.
Board member Todd Fane said he would like to see lawmakers stop dictating to local districts when to start and stop school.
“I just wish our state would submit to local control so we could manage that for our own communities,” Fane said.
Dr. Bill Redinger, assistant superintendent for human resources, told board members the calendar draft will now be open for public comment before the board approves it next month.
Redinger said the district has been doing a lot of surveying of parents this year and the calendar is no different. Redinger said the district got close to 2,000 comments on the calendar.
“We had more responses than I’ve ever seen,” Redinger said.
One other highlight on the calendar discussed thoroughly was taking the holiday of Presidents’ Day in February as an off day and moving it to Monday, April 18. Todd said it’s halfway through the second semester and planners thought it would be a good time to offer a break.
“When you look at the calendar as a whole, April is that one month without any sort of break,” Todd said. “We know, of course, teachers like a break here and there but students do occasionally need that breathing room.”