Board Votes to add Extra Days to School Year
From SPS:
The Seattle School Board on Wednesday decided to extend the school year by two days to make up for January’s inclement weather.
The last day of school will be Friday, June 22. Seattle students lost three days of school in January because of severe winter weather conditions. One day was made up on Jan. 27.
The School Board voted 0 to 7 against applying for a waiver from the state, which would have allowed Seattle Public Schools to not make up those two days. Not making up the days would have saved the district about $500,000.
“This is a statement on the value of classroom instruction,” said Board President Michael DeBell, after the unanimous vote.
The Seattle School Board on Wednesday decided to extend the school year by two days to make up for January’s inclement weather.
The last day of school will be Friday, June 22. Seattle students lost three days of school in January because of severe winter weather conditions. One day was made up on Jan. 27.
The School Board voted 0 to 7 against applying for a waiver from the state, which would have allowed Seattle Public Schools to not make up those two days. Not making up the days would have saved the district about $500,000.
“This is a statement on the value of classroom instruction,” said Board President Michael DeBell, after the unanimous vote.
Comments
Instead we'll have three days of extra school picnics and extra field trips and extra everything but education for a few days.
So call it a "victory" if you want, but I think it's really absurd that the Board did this now. And for my family, an expensive absurdity.
I imagine there will be a lot of unexcused absences for those last days. My family will unapologetically be one of them. The board/staff decision came far too late in the year. Family time is far, far more important than desk cleaning time. And frankly, given SPS's crap ability to plan, I will not invest hundreds of dollars on travel rebooking fees.
Any board member who truly believes learning happens those last few days, needs to get out of their ivory tower. And no, don't blame the teachers. Classrooms do have to be disassembled and final loose ends tied up.
I do blame the SEA and staff though. Putting snow day makeups at the end of the year is bogus.
-SLP
this whole focus on making up days is stupid... no one will ever be able to convince me that what the children MIGHT have learned in that 6-12 hours of class time is essential to their happiness or future success....
The District calendar says that snow days 2 and 3 will be added to the end of the school year, and as far as I saw they only announced that they would seek a waiver, not that they had been granted a waiver.
It is published when snow days will be made up and skipping the days had not been approved yet. I'm sure there are families that made plans and will be gone and this messes up our own families plans, BUT I feel the school board did the right thing.
There probably won't be a lot of learning happening on those last two days, but maybe there will be on the Thursday and Friday the week before, when there might not have been otherwise.
Maybe we can all lobby the school board to plan school around each of our families' vacation calendars. I know I would like mid-winter break back for a ski trip and a week off in October would be great - good time to visit Disneyland. Just cut the school year back to 100 days or so and it might work.
- kitty
parent
parent
-Laura
I can't say that the district has always done what they say they are going to. Not a strong point with them.
- kitty
What kind of a precedence would we be setting if the district applies for a state waiver every time we have a snow day, each year?
I appreciate that the Board is trying to respect "instructional days" but it would be much more effective to take away some of the full day releases & early dismissals etc. that eat away at instructional time all year long, instead of at the end of the year. We have absolutely no policy limiting either District mandated, nor site-based partial day releases which are extremely disruptive(some schools have one early release almost every week, many others have one every two weeks)!
Jane
No, the decision was made in May 2011. That's the date on the district calendar that's been pinned on my wall all year.
In May 2011, the district laid out a plan for how snow days would be made up. All that's happened now is that the district is being told to stick to its original plan, which we have all known about for nearly a year now. The plan itself never changed; people's hopes and expectations are all that changed.
I guess that I too don't understand what the big deal is. The possibility of a waiver is not the same thing as having a waiver granted. If I asked my boss if I could take certain days off and she said, "Let me check and get back to you," I wouldn't buy my tickets until I had a firm answer. That's exactly what's going on here. People apparently proceeded as if the waiver had been granted; that's not the district's fault or the Board's fault.
And the time to discuss whether it makes sense to add days at the end of the year is when the calendar is being developed, not after the snow has happened! The whole point of having contingency plans is so that everyone knows what to expect if inclement weather occurs and can plan accordingly.
--confused by the comments
Actually that concern was discussed on of the committee meetings. I think the Board is well aware of that issue.
I think making up time, in the future, should come out of PD or school year vacation days. Stick the PD at the end of the year.
your confusion is understandable. Kinda like what went down at Lowell. All the admin steps one must take and then don't take. In the end, the idea of using one's 100K+ paid salary to come up with some lame snow day planning and waiver seeking process to absolve the missteps involved is SO adminstratively perfect! Yeah, you're right, it's NOT the district's or the board's fault. Missing point is quality instructional time for kids.
Sheesh, the idea of allowing flexibility of PD timing to cover snow days is obviously too much for this district, SEA, or this board to consider. Must be a nightmare to figure who gets to go on bathroom or lunch break first down at JSCEE.
parent
parent
- Enough is enough
Are the PD days in existence largely so that the administration can justify its voluminous size and the need for time to continue pushing ineffective practices? Maybe with more refinement in PD time these practices might work better? There is no indication that the counterproductive plans for math over the last decade will work better with more PD.
-Good Grief!
I was at the A&F committee meeting when staff finally got their sh*t together and decided, yep, we're gonna ask for a waiver. Until then, all can presume that the CBA will be followed and the school year will be as long as it was originally set out to be.
This actually should cheer all those pro-1620BP folks. The Board leaves it up to the interim Superintendent to know the laws and the rules and act accordingly. Yet, in the event (as in this case but not all) the supt is required to consult and get authorization from the board, then the homework must get done. Does the board have to act like me and constantly ask "did you do your homework? Can I see it? Is that all of it?"
Where did the perception come from that, just because it's near the end of the school year, learning time is over?
I must be hardcore. My students are working until about 2 p.m. on the last day. Then, we have a liitle meeting and party where I tell them that, come September, I'll be checking on how much they read all summer (so they better be on it!).
I'm not the only teacher like this, by any means.
If you want to go on vacation early, then do it. Just don't convince yourself that it will be a free-for-all back in the classroom while you're gone.
By the way, I think that the testing culture has helped create this message. When the standardized tests are over, some people equate it with the end of instruction. That ain't the case.
--enough already
-de ja vu
From past experiences, I never schedule vacation the day after school gets let out.
First, "learning" is not the same thing as "seat time," (one would hope for a correlation; sometimes, with some kids -- it is an inverse correlation, like it or not). "Learning" is also not seasoned teachers, TFA teachers, test scores, service hours, PE requirements, or a whole host of other things required in school. One hopes that most of these things correlate, somewhere, along the way with the learning our kids need to accomplish to have the lives they want -- but it is a pretty strained correlation in some instances.
At the same time -- family time, and family finances are also important. And the District pretty much values them at zero. Long papers or test preparation assigned over holidays, homework that is time-consuming and/or flat-out stupid, transportation issues and starting times that require parents to drive kids or pay for before/after-school care. The list goes on. While I realize the schools can't bend and twist for every permutation, they could be much more flexible and reasonable -- if they valued family time, and family finances. But they don't --and so they aren't.
I hope, for the kids' sake, that "enough already" is right, and teachers have kids engaged in learning right up to the end. To the extent they don't -- what is the point of making them all be there at all? It only becomes justifiable if the value of their -- the kids'-- time is zero. And I don't think it is.
To suggest to parents who made travel plans (in reliance upon what the District said they were going to do) that somehow the "seat time" represents irreplaceable learning time seems wrong. In fact, my kids all made way more progress (at least in reading and math) over the summer than they did during equal amounts of time during the school year -- since they could set their own time, work at their own pace, and progress without a lot of the time/attention distractions of the school building.
Politically, I can see why the Board made this decision. And if enough teachers like "enough already" are out there maximizing every hour of time they have -- well, good. But I would bet that not all teachers are as diligent in this regard as "enough already" (especially since spring fever is pretty rampant by mid June).
When parents have the opportunity to take their kids on vacation, they are learning way more than I can ever teach them in a room (except when it comes to learning the very basics of reading and writing)--I am not pretending otherwise.
I just wanted to let you know what's happening between the walls where I'm coming from.
The so-called opportunity gap is widened during vacation--families with financial and/or educational means tend to enrich their children's learning, whereas parents without these means tend to have children who lose ground.
Go on vacation! Have a great time!
But know that I'm not letting up.
I don't know the timelines like Mirmac and others. It certainly seems like a delayed message from the school board, but it also sounds like they were following some protocol (which obviously has a too-slow turnaround time).
In terms of the big picture, applying for a waiver to miss instructional days sounds pretty pathetic, to me. Lots of kids in the district need more school days, not less.
Enjoy a guilt-free, much deserved vacation! Remember how priviliged we are (I can't wait for my next adventure).
--enough already...who keeps pretending to still have close-up vision (sorry about the continued typos)
--enough already
And "enough already," I'm guessing that you teach somewhere in the K-8 continuum. And I confess I wasn't thinking of that, since my own kids are in HS. In HS, any final exams/projects in classes that seniors take must be completed and graded before those seniors are scheduled to graduate. The District's calender suggests that the high schools are graduating June 15, 16, 18 and 19. Maybe there's still instruction at the lower grades. I've certainly been wrong before.
Besides travel, I don't have much of a life outside of my first grade classroom (no longer in Seattle).
So, yeah, you got that right! I'm in the earlier grades (probably in more ways than one).
--enough already
I just think this whole concept that teachers will have nothing to do in those last two days is insulting to teachers and students. Sure, some will check out, but most? I doubt it.
That's a sure way to cut the budget!
Now I'll be here babysitting those who choose to come instead of doing the clean up, paperwork, reorganizing and other stuff that I'm always there doing unpaid anyway.
Crazy.
just another teacher
It would be interesting to really brainstorm with the entire learning community (kids, teachers, parents, administrators) about how we deal with the year end. My personal impression is that my kids are chomping at the bit in September -- and then much of the first few weeks are squandered with no homework, no progress through the books, etc. It is the end of September or early October before they are really moving at freeway speed. Then, by June, when the seniors are already gone, they are tired, the weather is above 40 and rain has turned to drizzle, if not sunshine, I would imagine that they would love to be doing less, or at least something different. I know that I always had a harder time with the last paper, and the last exam -- and I was a pretty diligent student. It has to be hard for teachers to keep kids focused those last few days (which is why some teachers probably try to adapt their material to the attention levels, leaving parents to conclude not much is happening, leading to the "erosion issue" that Eric notes. I wish my kids' schools did a better job of jumping in right away in September, when they are rested and raring to go, and that we could think of ways to better use the last few days of the year, when many kids are counting hours to being out for the summer.
do NOT schedule optional family events within a week of the end of the school year, or, tough luck. whe people schedule their lives outside of the constraints of SPS, then SPS people have to choose - get over it.
RealProblemsPlease
fed up
YOu write in one comment that it's "all about CB agreement."
In another comment you write, "the idea of allowing flexibility of PD timing to cover snow days is obviously too much for this district, SEA, or this board to consider."
Did the SEA or CBA mandate that students come to school those days? I doubt it. The CBA mandates a certain amount of work days, and the staff would work those days, regardless. That wasn't the issue, the issue was whether students would be there.
Does the SEA mandate PD occur at scheduled times of year, is that the issue? And this meant SPS couldn't use that time for students and then move the PD to the end of the year? Please tell us if you know, because I don't, but you speak as if this is the union's fault and I just don't see it.
And moving "PD days to end of school year where you need time to clean up the classroom and complete your paperwork galore" ignores the purpose of PD, whether you agree with its content or not: PD is for staff collaboration or whatever to address teaching and learning in the school. It's not about "cleaning your classroom" (tho' I believe the CBA does contain language around one day at beginning and one day at end for classroom set-up and take-down.)
Forget the disruption to learning by maybe bailing 1-2 days early at the end of the year compared to the guaranteed regular built-in disruption of additional early release days throughout the entire school year.
PD early-release concerned
Example: In other districts I have experienced "make-up" days are included in the regularly scheduled school year. If 170 hours are the State minimum then the school year is scheduled to include one or even two extra weeks of instruction time by starting the school year earlier in September or even in August.
If there are days lost to power outage, boiler failure, snow, etc. then those days are taken from the reserve of the extended school year.
If there are no days lost -- then bonus -- then all of the scheduled days are available for instruction.
I suspect SPS schedules only the bare minimum to have extra monies for pet projects - for example $5 - $7 million for the upgrade of the IT infrastructure to support the MAP test.
Schools have to plan to a known school year to reserve parks, pools, transportation for end of year celebrations.
Are students going to pay attention once they have been handed their end of year certificates or diplomas? No.
Adding extra days to the end of the school year does not genuinely add to actual instruction days. IMO - This particular vote from the School Board was purely political and for show.
If actual days of instruction were actually valued then a school year beyond the bare minimum would be a part of the plan each and every year. It would not be a last minute scramble to fit in a day here or there.
and then closed with Director DeBell's quote about the value of education Anyone else think that was funny? and probably not a good public relations move?!
Two and a half years to go
Juliette
Or are we *really* paying $500K *more* with the added days? Are our contracts with the buses and food services such that we pay for their services on snow days even if not used? I hope out contracts are better than that!
Just so all of you know, if the last day of school is Friday, June 22nd, I will will be giving finals on Wednesday, the 20th and Thursday the 21st. We will review on Monday and Tuesday, the 18th and 19th. My Algebra classes do not end just because we have taken the EOC. We do school till the end of the school year (I'm sure you would get that response from any high school teacher). I'm not sure how receptive I will be to anyone who says they are not going to be here because they have some vacation planned.
I would take it one step further and totally do away with early dismissal or no school day PD's. They detract from the education of the children.
Amen about PD early dismissals and no school days.
Apparently, some studies showed that staffs who collaborate and study research have better outcomes. However, the teachers in the studies created such cultures in their schools organically, not by mandate.
Imposing nonsense and poor curricula onto schools, along with "coaches" who often were poor teachers, is a recipe for a waste of time (and a need for some Advil). Most teachers dread required time spent with the "experts" who do drive-by sound bytes.
Students who are struggling, especially, need consistency in school schedules.
PD (as currently done in schools) is another example of research that is not understood and then applied without intelligence.
Now if Dan Dempsey were giving the PDs, it would be time well spent...
--enough already
There are a number of things that go into that additional cost number, the few that I can think of quickly are: some of the food would have spoiled and has to be replaced - never mind the craziness of the food program having to serve certain things on certain days and some things won't store for a month. Some building staff - I believe custodians in particular - have a set month off in summer, and tasks that have to happen during the summer. Some of that $500K will be in overtime for them so that summer cleaning/repair tasks can be done. Then, there are building repair projects contracted out - that work counts on certain days being available for work during the summer. Since the work might have to be delayed a day or two, SSD has to pay any over time needed to complete the jobs on time. I"m sure there are office staffers who are on a 9month schedule, who have to be paid for a few extra days at the end.
In some ways I'm surprised the number isn't bigger that $500K. Reference point SSD has a $567 million annual budget (from the rbook12.pdf on the SSD website).