In the 2018-19 school year, there will be multiple changes to the school calendar regarding the first day, last day and school breaks. These changes were recently approved by the District Calendar Committee, and the new school calendar is now published on the school website.

According to principal Jason Johnston, the reason for the calendar edits is that the state changed the attendance requirement for students from a number of days to a number of minutes.

“Several years back, the state used to require students to go to school for a certain number of days,” Johnston said. “They changed it to a specific number of minutes, which gave schools more flexibility of how long they went to school and how long or short the number of days within the school calendar was. And so, what you see now is schools counting minutes as opposed to days, and that’s what drives the schedule.”

Due to this change, the beginning of the school year will be on a Wednesday, three weekdays before the original start date. According to Johnston, this is one of the largest changes being made for next year.

“The end result is that it allows us to get out before June,” Johnston said. “Actually, before Memorial Day, so that was the plus side for us on that stand point.”

Since school ends before Memorial Day, graduation day will be on May 24. According to Johnston, this means a longer summer as well as a better opportunity to see family from other parts of the country.

“I’m excited about the being finished before Memorial Day,” Johnston said. “It gives us more of our summer, and I think it will be easier for our families, especially with graduation on that Friday, to have families come in and be able to stick around for a holiday weekend.”

The new calendar has also slightly changed when school breaks are, as well as incorporated more early-release days before holidays which, according to Johnston, will give people more time to travel.

“Other big changes from across the district would be some early release days, so some days before a holiday, it was important for the district to want to give our students and families some time to maybe make plans to travel, and to be able to get out a little early on those,” Johnston said. “So we have more early release days than we had in the past.”

Another big change for the students is the new school start time. While this year it was 8:15 a.m., next year it will be pushed back to 8:30 a.m. in order to account for travel and tutoring times.

“We’ve got the STEAM Center and the Dual Credit facility that are going to open in the next few years, so we needed to make some adjustments to our schedule to ensure some travel times,” Johnson said. “[It will also] provide some additional time in the morning for our teachers to work with our kids and additional times for kids to have some breakfast.”

According to Johnston, the overall feedback on the calendar has been positive, and no disappointed teachers or parents have approached him.

“I know that some people were worried about the earlier start times, [and] some were excited about the earlier start times,” Johnston said. “Some were worried about it being before Memorial Day [and] others were excited about it being before. So it was a pretty broad range of opinions on that, but ultimately, I think the district did a great job, and their committee did a great job of building a schedule that’s very beneficial.”