Put away the book, nerd. It’s only August 20th.
Sen. Leising seems to have a thing for schools and “the good old days.” Her perennial windmill is, of course, attempting to have the State government mandate school curriculum relative to cursive writing for what I regard as a combination of nostalgia and specious reasoning. (This year, she submitted her cursive bill as SB 8.)
With her SB 7, which would prohibit schools from starting earlier than the last Monday in August, I also detect a strong whiff of nostalgia. I’ve also heard it characterized as a response to lobbying efforts from the amusement park industry. Whatever the lobbying background of this proposal might be, my sense is that more generalized support for this initiative is going to be from people with a sense that back in the good old days, we had longer summers. When I was a kid, and my birthday rolled around in early August, I still had a few weeks of vacation left. I seem to recall my parents talking about school not starting until after Labor Day.
Aside from the general idea that school corporations are perfectly capable of organizing their calendars without dictation from Indianapolis, West Lafayette’s superintendent, Rocky Killion, had a column in the Journal & Courier a few weeks ago discussing some of the problems with this proposal.
? Indiana code requires 180 days of instruction for all public schools.
? If public schools cannot begin school until the fourth week of August, then students will be attending school through mid-June.
? Students and staff members involved with advance placement tests would not be able to participate in the national testing schedules.
? It is better for high school students to finish their first semester finals before winter break rather than having to take several weeks off and then come back and finish first semester at the end of January.
? Seniors who plan to graduate early will now have to return in January to finish their first semester and may possibly be prevented from enrolling into college until the fall semester.
? All three public school districts in Tippecanoe County serve students whose parents are associated with Purdue University. When Purdue University ends classes in early May, many parents will be forced to choose between staying in the area through mid-June or taking their children out of school before the end of second semester.
? High school athletics would begin nearly a month before school starts.
Even though I’m not immune from grumbling about “back in my day” when my kids go back to school in the heart of August, the fact is that the scheduling works out o.k. And I trust that our local officials have decent reasons for implementing the schedule the way they do. They have lives and families outside the schools, just like we do, and I doubt they are any more eager to cut summer short than anyone else. But, there are competing considerations involved. And the General Assembly may not know how to appropriately weigh those considerations for each community.
re: calendar A more important law that could be of some use would be if the state’s schools operated on an identical schedule from whatever day school begins, with identical breaks and end of terms. Start after Labor Day if they wish, or start August 1st, or take a month off in the coldest part of winter — that would make no difference. The key is to get kids who move around because their parents can’t pay the rent doing the same lessons on the same day everywhere in the state as much as possible.
As a former teacher, I’d sometimes have kids move from the district and then move back to the district twice in the same year!!
I had to move (once) in the 3rd grade so I know how disruptive this is. Here’s what happened to me: I was at Noblesville and we ended the year just before Memorial Day. The school I moved to was a rural district which didn’t even have as many days of school, and all schools in the county (Wells) ended the year on May 3rd that year. When I got to Wells Co., I was lost in what they were doing in Arithmetic because my former school would not get to that material until 3 weeks later. Those 3 weeks threw me behind in math the rest of my life.
The school I taught at adopted the insane trimester system. Kids would move in and not even be able to continue with the classes they were taking in their former school, and/or just have to sit in the cafeteria for 10 weeks for some subjects until a new term started.
I’m not against local control on some things, but on the calendar? We really should ALL be on the same stuff with the same system at the same time.
1. Jean Leising is a dolt.
2. There is a group of corporate interests pouring lobbying dollars in to a school calendar change.
3. Most of the legislature really doesn’t care and will end up agreeing to about anything so people (and Leising) will stop pestering them about school start dates.
4. This isn’t the craziest bill as I am hearing rumors that a House rep will introduce a bill that cuts down the number of school days and mandate a school year that runs from Labor Day to Memorial Day.
I think the compromise will settle out with school starting around the middle of August (to get past the first 2 weekends of the State Fair when the 4H shows occur) with no mandated end date. This will result in the end of balanced calendars as local pressure will result in schools trying to end by Memorial Day.
By my count there are roughly 205 school days between August 13, 2018 (2nd Monday and first Monday after 2 weekends of the fair) and May 24, 2019 (Friday before Memorial Day) and it should be similar for future years.
That allows for 25 days off to fit in 180 days. 10 days at Christmas, 10 days for Spring and Fall Break and 5 days to cover Thanksgiving, MLK, Labor Day and Presidents Day.
Does that accommodate built-in snow days? I know we have a few three day weekends thrown into the school calendar that are eliminated as necessary to make up for snow days without extending the school year past the scheduled end-date.
No it would not account for snow days. Though snow days are becoming a thing of the past with 1:1 technology and “e-learning” days.
As is typical, the legislature doesn’t really understand what they are doing with school calendars and will muck it up. Then local schools will take the brunt of the criticism and have to clean it up/make it work.
Ideology, nostalgia and specious reasoning. Just as there are agencies that evaluate a law based on its legal characteristics and how much it costs, there should be one evaluating those characteristics. We need some agency to say, “Sorry, but there are no data to support the reasons for this to occur. Ideology gets 7 out of 10, nostalgia gets 9 our of 10 and specious reasoning 9 out of 10.
In any case, I think Stephen makes a good point that the calendars should be standardized. That is one contribution that the state could make to th e whole scheme, that could make it rise about the high nostalgia score, but it needs to be made based on the input of the people who have to implement it. I’m wondering if the superintendents of school had anything to say about this. I suspect it’s part of their yearly surprise package.
Our school superintendent is strongly against this.
And you have one excellent superintendent.
Your Superintendent should be. Along with about every other one in the state,
Superintendents know about it as they have been throwing this around for a couple of years. However, 85% of the legislators will tell you they just don’t care to expend political capital on this issue and schools will have to sort it out.
No offense Doug, but your superintendent is against 99% of the stuff the state does and hurts more than helps when he takes to the public PR trail.
As usual, the Indiana Legislature is only in favor of local control when they’re the locals who get to do the controlling. The “school districts near college campuses” example is enough to make this thing get buried in the Rules committee or wherever bad bills go to die.
School calendars are not actually about scheduling one 180-day stretch – it’s about scheduling two 90-day semesters (or maybe 89/91 or 88/92 but not much different in length than that due to semester-long classes at the secondary level that need to cover the same content with first semester kids as they do with second semester kids). A majority of Indiana districts have decided that they need that first stretch of 90 days to end before Christmas. That keeps finals from being given after a two-week break (not good instructional practice), gives counselors time to redo schedules for kids who fail a first semester class, and allows kids who graduate after the first semester of their senior year (which absolutely happens) to be able to enroll in college classes that start in early January. A full 90-day first semester cannot happen if the school year starts in late August. It simply isn’t possible. This is a horrible bill that will cripple school districts from being able to set calendars that work for their students. Why should students in my suburban Indianapolis district hurt because Holiday World can’t find cheap labor in August (the impetus for this bill)?
School calendars are not actually about scheduling one 180-day stretch – it’s about scheduling two 90-day semesters (or maybe 89/91 or 88/92 but not much different in length than that due to semester-long classes at the secondary level that need to cover the same content with first semester kids as they do with second semester kids).
Sure, I was just using the 180 days in days available math to easily show how difficult this would be.
Yes – just commenting more about the bill in general. The general public (and I include legislators in this as well unless they’re involved in public education as their actual “day job”) typically doesn’t understand the complexities of this issue. There are so many factors that go into it…which is why it’s a decision best left to local school boards who can weigh all of these factors and other factors more specific to their own communities (like availability of childcare during long breaks…being in a “college town”…summer job prospects for teens like districts near Holiday World…even agriculture considerations for rural school districts).
Agriculture is one of the growing sectors of our economy (projected 7% growth over the next 10 years and 60,000 new positions over the next 5) and is not just a rural school issue. The state president of the Indiana FFA is from Hamilton Southeastern. One of the largest FFA chapters was at an IPS school for a number of years. Ag is a high tech STEM field today and is a field that is atttacting some of the best and brightest from my local school populations.
Great point. It’s an exciting area, loaded with potential where virtually every academic field has something to offer with a unique involvement. And it’s literally a “growing” area, with the population of the world promising to explode while scientists and technology folks are figuring out better ways to increase production. If you get the chance look at a corn production graph. It’s the classic “hockey stick”, with corn production falling at 20 bpa through the early 40s and suddenly exploding. Las year, the average crop was around 171 bpa. Glad you mentioned it.
Yes, agriculture jobs in general are certainly not just something for students in rural school. However, the subject at hand is issues that may potentially impact school calendars and start-dates/end-dates/Breaks, and I think you would only see agriculture issues being considered as a factor in areas where you have a lot of current farming families in a district. It wouldn’t be tied to the number of students considering future careers in agriculture. Either way, the main point is that the school calendar needs to be a local decision based on local needs. Those needs will be different in districts across the state.
So rural schools will now attend through the summer and take a 40 school day planting and harvest break? That is a truly farming-centric calendar.
I understand what is being talked. I also understand why some jtake issue with someone who dismisses Ag as just farming that concerns no one outside of rural schools. My siblings and I had a teacher like that in school (at a large suburban Indy school). She admonished my sister that there was no place in Ag for a smart girl like her. My sister is now one of the top people in her field and a college professor in animal science.
My support for careers in agriculture is very strong, though seemingly irrelevant to the topic of school calendars. The only thing that I’m saying is that school boards should get to choose the calendar that works best for their local district. My entire point about anything related to agriculture is that local school boards are the ones that should get to decide what, if any, impact factors like that should have on their calendar. If a district’s elected school board members – whether the district is in a rural, suburban, or urban part of the state – want to take something like that into consideration, then I think it should be up to them and not up to our legislators.
With the new graduation pathways schools will have to consider the potential careers of their students. To meet some of the employable skills requirements will require allowing kids access to industry at times when they can work or complete projects.
Oh, no. Sometimes you don’t want to know how sausage is made or why laws are introduced. Holiday World!!
This site is a huge public service to people who want to be good citizens and actually know about what the legislature is or is not doing. I wrote my representative about this bill, urging him not to vote for it. Thanks all.
Right now in Franklin Township (Franklin Central Schools) the school year starts on July 27th and then the first break is Oct 10 – 23rd. The next two week break is at Xmas Dec 17th through Jan 2nd.
The 2nd semester starts on Jan 3rd. The spring break is March 20th through April 2nd. This is very popular among parents giving them a two week period for spring break. The last day of school is May 25th. This gives the kids a two month summer and plenty of break time through the year.
The New Palestine school system uses a extra three days of their Xmas vacation and gives the kids Mon – Wed giving them the whole Thanksgiving weekend off. Personally I think that is a wonderful idea.
My idea is for the legislature to keep their hands off. School systems should be run locally.
Could be Kings Island could be in on the lobbying effort. Yeah never know.
I recall that in the mid-1980s State Senator Augsburger, from Syracuse, proposed a bill that would not permit schools to start until after Labor Day. Augsburger owned a grocery store in Syracuse and North Webster. Syracuse is on Lake Wawasee and North Webster is near numerous recreational lakes.
Oh yeah. No conflict of interest there. Indiana Legislature, they name is Conflict of Interest.
The local newspapers condemned the proposed bill because of the obvious conflict of interest.