Districts Cope with Fewer School Days, Try to Determine Effects (ID)

September 7, 2010

Summertime breaks from school got longer this year.

For many Magic Valley school districts, state budget cuts led to a later start of school this year. Idaho’s public schools, faced with reduced state funding, have had to trim days of student instruction from their schedules. The end result is that some districts, including Twin Falls School District, will start school after Labor Day this year rather than in the latter part of August.

“We know these cuts are going to hurt,” said TFSD Superintendent Wiley Dobbs. “We tried to minimize the damage as much as we could.”

The district is cutting eight days of classroom instruction, four of which are half days. The reduction goes against the district’s inclination to add instruction time for students, Dobbs said.

“We don’t even use snow days very often,” he said. “Our district’s been very intentional in trying to add classroom time. The focus — the thought in our district — has been to add time to the year, not subtract.”

Aside from cutting school days, the district also canceled its traditional opening-day ceremony.
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“We’re in an emergency situation and we definitely are going to do the best we can,” Dobbs said. “Students and parents will notice that it’s different this year. We have less time.”

Although school districts across the state have prepared to cope with that reduction to instruction time, it remains unknown how student achievement will be impacted by the cuts.

An uncertain outcome

For school districts, reducing the school year usually equates to moving the schedule closer to state-mandated minimum requirements for hours of education, which haven’t changed amid the state’s budget crunch. The annual state requirements are: 990 hours for students in grades 9-12; 900 hours for students in grades 4-8; 810 hours for students in grades 1-3; and 450 hours for kindergartners.

For now, it’s too soon to gauge how a reduction to instruction hours will affect student achievement. Districts have trimmed their schedules by differing amounts, and the results of most standardized tests that students will take this year won’t be released until summer 2011.

“It’s going to be difficult to predict,” said Melissa McGrath, spokeswoman for the State Department of Education. “We know that every teacher, every educator, every teacher’s aide, and every parent is going to do the best they can to make sure this budget does not impact student achievement. Whether or not it will eventually have an impact on student achievement is yet to be seen.”

Nora Kent, president of the Vera C. O’Leary Middle School athletics booster club in Twin Falls, sees pros and cons to the situation. Starting after Labor Day, she said, makes more sense than students returning to school for several days in August and then getting a three-day h oliday weekend.

She’s not worried about a reduction to class time creating an academic hardship for her son, an eighth-grader at O’Leary. But she’s concerned about the impact on students that are already struggling.

“They’re young; they’ll adapt,” she said of the students. “Most of them will be fine. For the ones that are struggling already, I think it’s going to be a hardship on them.”

Laurie Boeckel, legislative vice president of the Idaho Parent Teacher Association, said the organization understands that districts are facing severe financial challenges, but said that parents still have concerns about their children receiving less time in class.

“Anytime you have any type of reduction or cuts in instruction time, parents are going to be concerned,” she said, adding that she hopes the Legislature will adequately address the issue in the upcoming session.

Sherri Wood, president of the Idaho Education Association, said she worries about the impact of lost classroom days, as well as a reduction to professional-development days for teachers, which are crucial for training about new programs.

She also expressed concerns about what point the reduced days for education will stop.

“It’s kind of like: Where will we cut this off?” Wood said. “I don’t know where you stop this unless the citizens of our state say enough is enough.”

Though many have already reduced the length of their school years, Magic Valley districts are expected to pull in about $6.6 million of one-time federal funding as part of the $10 billion that Congress appropriated nationally to aid teacher salaries amid the economic downturn. For now, Idaho districts are waiting for the funding, which isn’t due to arrive until early October, before they decide whether to use it to reinstate cut school days.

At the same time, districts are allowed to spread those funds across the next two school years, and some are weighing how much of the federal funding to save for 2012. No school districts have made any commitments for how they will spend the money.

Different districts, different methods

A large portion of the uncertainty surrounding how student achievement will be effected by the reductions is that they aren’t uniform across Idaho school districts. While Twin Falls School District trimmed four full days and four half days, other area districts came to different agreements with their teachers while setting contracts for this school year.

Castleford School District, which succeeded in passing a supplemental levy to help offset a reduction in state funding this year, avoided the need to make cuts to its 176 classroom days, said Superintendent and Principal Andy Wiseman. School started Aug. 18 for the district.

If further budget holdbacks occur, the district has a contingency plan in place to reduce days by the same percentage that a holdback would be, Wiseman said.

Filer School District hasn’t changed its number of classroom days, though teachers will take unpaid furlough days on other days like holidays, said Superintendent John Graham. The district already starts school on the Tuesday after Labor Day, a practice that’s suitable because of the high number of students involved in the Twin Falls County Fair, Graham said.

With 166 days of instruction instead of 175, Kimberly School District is cutting back by nine days and starts on Tue sday instead of late August.

That allows teachers with part-time summer jobs to work longer into the summer and students involved in the fair don’t have their school routine disrupted, said Superintendent Kathleen Noh. It also cuts down on air-conditioning costs.

Jerome School District trimmed its school calendar by 5 1/2 days to 174 days.

Superintendent Dale Layne said the district goal is to have a tight, compact calendar that has all the class days between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

“If you’re just here a day or two and then have a three-day break, that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

While it will cut six days out of its schedule, Buhl School District is adding time to each school day, resulting in only five hours of instruction lost for the year.

“I don’t see that it will be too much of a condensation of lessons,” said Superintendent Byron Stutzman. “ … It will probably be that teachers look at their pacing calendars and make adjustments on things that can be moved out of the lesson plans.”

The downside is that fewer days means there’s less time for activities like field trips for students that supplement their learning, he said.

Teachers also added 15 minutes to the start of their workday, time that will be used for collaborative meetings, Stutzman said.

Classes at Wendell School District started Aug. 25, and the school year will have 169 1/2 days, a loss of 5 1/2 days.

Items cut from the schedule to keep time focused on instruction include a freshman-only orientation day and open-house events. This year, freshm an students will have orientation with the whole student body, said Superintendent Greg Lowe.

“We just going to ensure that every hour is used effectively because of losing those days,” Lowe said.

Gooding School District, which switched to a four-day week last school year, didn’t make major changes to its calendar.

One change for this year is that the district has dropped an optional day of extra help that students could get on Fridays. On any given Friday, about 25 percent of students attended the extra help sessions, a program that about 60 percent of students used at one point or another during the school year.

Those days were cut from teacher contracts, said Superintendent Heather Williams.

In place of making teachers available for extra help sessions, the district will rely on supplemental educational services, and give parents some say in the company that’s selected, Williams said.

“We’re just hoping that our kids are able to get the help that they need,” Williams said.