Story Published:
Aug 6, 2010 at 9:57 AM CST
Story Updated:
Aug 6, 2010 at 10:04 AM CST
In 2010, there was one week of spring break, due primarily to the large number of snow days. Director of Schools Airhart had given ample warning of the need for the reduction based on the snow and then, later, flooding and rain.
But last night, the chairman of the Calendar committee, Sharon Griggs (3rd through 8th grade curriculum supervisor) made the announcement that due to standardized testing conflicts, the committee was recommending that the 2011 Spring Break once again be limited to one week.
The reason is that Pearson’s, the standardized testing company, changed their test schedule from a 4 week window to a 2 week window of April 11th to 22nd which are the dates of the Putnam County scheduled spring break.
Mae Fowler called the state and asked if we could test outside of this window, and the state said, “No.”
At that point, the calendar committee reconvened on July 9, and after careful consideration, made their recommendation for a one week break. Backing into the schedule, the committee considered the following critical testing dates: the first week of May is the “Gateway Test,” the second week of May is the “end of course;” and the TCAP is April 14 through 21. Based on these dates, the recommendation last night was to move to a one-week spring break March 14 through 18.
Friday, the 22 (Good Friday) would be off, and this would allow the school year to end 4 days earlier on Tuesday, May 24, instead of Saturday, May 28 (provided there were no excessive weather days to be made up).
Before voting, School Board Member Jerry Maynard had some hard questions primarily stemming around the fact that last year, when school started 2 weeks late, the board had at that time voted to go back to the plan of a “9/ 2 calendar” (nine weeks at school and two weeks off).
Maynard questioned, “So are we going to abandon that? Have you thought about the future? Are we going to be 9/1 or 9/2 in the future?”
“No, sir,” responded Griggs. “According to the responses we got, the majority of the people in the school district like the 9/2 schedule. We have the 9/2 schedule in there this year. It’s just that because Pearson is a new company that took over the state testing, they changed the window, and they would not give us permission to test outside of it.”
Maynard commented, “I do have some concerns about that—we’ve made a commitment and we can’t honor the commitment. This will be two years in a row that we haven’t been able to honor our calendar.”
Mae Fowler inserted that the teachers had expressed concerns about having 10 days off around all the testing.
Maynard questioned whether or not this (testing dates) was going to be an ongoing issue every year.
Fowler responded that the legislators were going to step into this process and take care of it on behalf of the school systems.
Fowler said that in the future, testing will happen after the first Monday following April 22.
