So far this school year, we have only used two snow days, allowing school to finish as early as the third week of May. As of right now, school is ending early with a spring break included.
“Typically spring break is sacred. We don’t touch it, unless we go over our days, but there’s a pretty good chance spring break would not be affected. We still have four days left that are built into the calendar so that gives us a little bit of leeway. And snow days usually have been taken off at the end of the school year,” Instructional Technical Facilitator Brenda Spurgeon said.
Planning the school calendar is a long process. The first draft is far from the final calendar.
“Dr. Zalis first proposes three draft calendars based on our previous year’s calendar and sends that to the calendar committee. The committee then sends it out to their building people to get feedback on which one they prefer. Then after they come back we have a calendar committee meeting where everybody discusses the feedback, makes any changes, and looks for any conflicts they might have. After that we go in and tweak it, unless the calendar committee can come up with an agreement to the dates. Finally Dr. Zalis cleans up the calendar and sends it out to everyone again for approval in the districts and the administrators. Then after that it goes to the school board who makes the final approval. The only things that are ever tweaked are sometimes the CSD days. But sometimes the calendar can change even after the calendar committee sees it,” Spurgeon said.
The calendar is made to accommodate important academic dates as well.
“The main things that stay in place are we always try to finishfirst semester by Christmas because high school teachers feel very strongly about trying to wrap up finals. They want to give the kids a real break over Christmas break instead of having finals when they come back. Sometimes after Christmas we’ll get snow days and then the year can get all chopped up,” Spurgeon said.
Everything is planned in accordance with the calendar.
“Before school starts teachers only have a weekend to get all their paperwork together and ready for the new semester. And so we have to count back so many days and say ok well this is when we have to start just to be able to finish by Christmas. And second semester we always try to get done before graduation,” Spurgeon said.
Graduation is also a contributor to the calendar.
“Graduation is locked in at that Friday of Memorial Day. So by the time you lock that in and put in spring break it’s pretty much set when we’re going to start and when we’re going to stop. Within a day or two our calendar is not going to change drastically,” Spurgeon said.
