Schools
School District Hosts First of Three Calendar Forums
Ski week? Time off to tour college campuses? When should spring break be? The superintendent invites the community to be part of the complex process of establishing a district schedule.
Creating a school calendar is a little like making stew. Everyone has a favorite list of differing ingredients.
Back in the day schools would send out a calendar and parents would comply. Today many parents are more proactive.
In order to give parents the chance to “feel some of the angst involved,” Superintendent Jeffrey Felix scheduled a series of forums to solicit input. The second is set for 2:30 p.m. Monday in Coronado High's cafeteria; the first was held Thursday.
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Participants were asked to create a calendar for grades K-12, keeping in mind that there are days when schools have to close: federal and state holidays, special events and some religious holidays.
There are some uniquely Coronado issues. Many parents have asked for a “ski week” sometime in February, in addition to the traditional spring break. Forty-eight percent of 262 people surveyed last year by Parents and Teachers Together (PATT) last year supported the idea.
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Time in the fall to visit college campuses also has been a popular demand. Though when it was raised at the forum by school board president Bruce Shepherd, Felix told him only about 150 of the district's 3,000 students would take advantage of that time.
Ski week also got little traction. None of the attendees expressed much interest in taking an extra week off so affluent families could jet off to the slopes.
Nor did those who attended show interest in tying spring break to Easter. Everyone endorsed the idea of taking the third week of March off as well as taking a full week at Thanksgiving.
“Lots of parents take Wednesday off for a travel day, but if you give them Wednesday it bleeds off into Monday and Tuesday,” said Karl Mueller, principal at Coronado High School. “You might as well give them the whole week.”
The key concerns of this meeting, made up of trustees, administrators, and a smattering of teachers and parents, was the learning cycle. One teacher, for example, asked for a spring schedule that allowed her to properly introduce subtraction to her first graders.
The third meeting will be at 6 p.m. Oct. 18 in the middle school's Granzer Hall.