The yearly day requirement of 180 could change to a yearly hourly requirement of 1,080 hours.
April 11, 2014
Due to weather complications, state administrators are thinking about changing the year requirement from 180 days to 1,080 hours. With late starts and snow days, the district has lost 65 hours of instructional time.
A legislation passed a year ago allows the district to have a choice of their school year requirement being days or hours. One problem caused by this legislation is not being able to have early outs on Thursdays, and any days where students are released early, the whole day would not count toward the requirement.
“Which obviously is not an ideal situation,” school board president Sally Hoelscher said. “Now they’ve addressed those issues. I would anticipate the district would move to using an hours approach to the calendar.”
Just in the last month, a legislation has been passed that solves those problems. If the district changes to the hourly requirement, extra hours would be built into the calendar so schools could have delays if needed and easily make up that lost instructional time.
“I don’t think we’re going to be affected broadly,” dean of students, Doug Lestina said. “Students aren’t going to notice this huge change.”
The district has decided to stick with the day requirement for the upcoming school year. However, this might affect future classes.
“I’m not sure at what point they might revisit that decision and look at the hours,” City High principal John Bacon said. “It was looked at, but I think for a variety of reasons they chose to stay.”
With the loss of time and sacrifice of students’ education, district officials will revisit the issue to benefit the school system.
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