150 day school year calendar

As we have been working our way through the research of the four-day week and listening to patron input about the idea, many suggestions have been made. The Board of Trustees asked me to develop a calendar that had many of the financial benefits of the four-day week idea but was more traditional in nature (i.e., go to school most weeks for five days).

Mr. Caldwell and I collaborated on just such an idea which I am calling the 150-day school year calendar. This calendar can be viewed at the following link: 150 day calendar. This calendar starts school the day after labor day and ends school the Friday before Memorial weekend. It actually adds five more days of school than the calendar we developed for the four-day week. You will see a number of "vacation days" which have been designed to fall on historically low attendance days which would maximize our average daily attendance which is directly related to state funding.

We shortened the length of the extended school day from 70 to 35 minutes. With this reduction, but the extra five days, we have created a calendar that provides kindergarten students with 486 hours of instruction which is eleven more than they currently have. We are also entertaining the idea of offering a bonus afternoon kindergarten session for parents who would like their children to attend kindergarten for a full day for $250 per month tuition. The 150 day calendar provides 947 hours of instruction for grade 1-6 students compared to the current 992. Secondary students would receive 1,002 hours compared with the current 1,065. There would be no early release days and secondary classes would be 56 minutes long compared to the current 60 minutes (however, that is in a seven versus six period day).

Is this the ideal calendar? I doubt that it is, but it is an idea to generate discussion. The savings from this calendar only differ by about $2,000 from the four-day school week calendar. Would a calendar like this negatively affect student achievement? That is a difficult question to answer. The research on schools that have transitioned to a four-day school week have found that student achievement did not decrease. However, I have yet to find any research which indicates that reducing instructional time increases student achievement other than the literature on the four-day school week. There is good research that indicates that increasing instructional time improves student achievement. My best guess would be that our students would continue to achieve well but teachers would have to eliminate some activities which might not relate directly to Idaho Achievement Standards.