Dear Families,
I am pleased to share with you our 2018-2019 school year calendar. You will find it here. This was voted on and approved by our school board of trustees Thursday evening. This calendar constituted much collaboration between our school staff, surveys and feedback from parents. We tried to balance out the calendar as best we could in the best interest of our school community and really feel it does. Thank you for your patience as we have been working to get this complete and approved. We will begin working on the 2019-2020 calendar in hopes to have that approved by our May board meeting.
Here are some pieces of information behind some of the reasoning of our calendar or changes from the past year:
School Start Date: Survey results and feedback from staff and parents came back overwhelmingly in favor of starting one week before Labor Day. We had a two-year run of starting two-weeks before Labor Day.
2-Hour Late Starts: For the second consecutive year we will not be having 2-hour late starts. Our survey results indicated system-wide favor of no 2-hour late starts. By omitting 2-hour late starts, we are adding 18 hours of instruction time into our schedule.
Friday, August 31st: This is an important day for our school. With our co-op with St. Clair in football we only have two regular season home football games this year, and August 31st is one of them. This will be an important day for our school to drum up some school spirit and hopefully have a pepfest with the St. Clair players to feed into that excitement.
Spring Break: This is no doubt a change from this year. Our general feedback has been to not have a spring break; it is 'too long' and 'too disruptive for our students' were common points of feedback. By having a spring break, there is a long period of time between breaks in the calendar. So, we have shortened our spring break to a couple of days, which also aligns with the end of the third quarter. This will be consistent with our 2019-2020 spring break as we move forward with that planning.
I just want to go back and touch on Monday's occurrence when the transformer blew out at SSND and we had to close school early. This is obviously a surprise situation that we can't predict, like a potential snow day but yet, have to be prepared for. While the call to close school was the right one, we realize we still have improvements to make in our communication efforts and will continue to work on those efforts.
I hope everyone has a wonderful break and a blessed Easter! Enjoy your time with family and friends. We look forward to seeing everyone on April 3!