Wasatch County School District is proposing a new calendar for 2021 to meet the needs of the academic rigor and activities in the district. The proposed calendar includes natural breaks between terms, an earlier start to the school year, longer Christmas break and graduation with the end of school year occuring before Memorial Day. Jim Judd outlined the process and the reason for the traditional calendar, which was previously tied to the lack of air conditioning in the elementary schools.
Jim Judd has been working on calendaring for the school district since 2002, and gave an overview of the needs of the district when looking at an updated calendar. “When we look at the calendar we are looking for some key principles. The first one is we want it to make academic sense, our highest priority is student academics, so we want one that fits that bill. It needs to fulfill state requirements, it has to have 180 days of school and the principals have to have 990 hours of instruction in those 180 days. We look at testing dates and so some of those testing days, these are some of tests we do: The ACT that’s a date we don’t get to pick, it is when it is during the year and so how many instructional days before that date impact how we do on that test. Things like RISE, ASPIRE, they aren’t set, they are determined by our last day of school. They can fluctuate. WEDA is our test we give to all our English Language Learners in our district, we don’t have control over that date, it’s set by the state. AP, we don’t have control over that, it’s set nationally. And so when we pick a calendar we like, there is a preference to having more days in front of those dates. Because it makes sense, more days of instruction. We like the idea of natural quarter breaks, so we have longer breaks during the year. We have Fall Break, Christmas Break and Spring Break. We like the idea of having our quarters end at that time. And then weighing out vacations.”
“One of the reasons you may ask, or that people will ask why we haven’t been always doing this calendar, because we think this calendar makes the most sense. I think probably the biggest reason is Air Conditioning. Historically we didn’t have air conditioning in the elementary schools and we felt like we couldn’t get kids to school in August, the later the better. The school board solved that issue ten years ago, or more. That barrier has been removed and we’ve been doing the status quo without a real good reason why we are starting so late in August.” That was JR Smith Elementary Principal Ryan Brown that corrected Judd by mentioning it was just two years ago that his school was retrofitting with AC.
Wasatch High Principal Tod Johnson remarked on how this calendar adjustment will be a positive change for the high school programs and give appropriate rest dates after the rigor of term educational instruction as well as provide adequate learning days prior to testing.
“This meets academics goals for the school and I feel like it is strategic towards the outcomes we are pursuing. And in one way it gives us more instructional days prior to ACT and AP testing, also it gives us more focus at the end of first semester. It’s very difficult to try and teach through December and take a two week break and have one or two weeks after that to try and finish up the term. I also really like the idea that there are focus periods of learning, followed by a period of rest. So instead of having to rest in the middle of a period of learning, it removes some of the focus, this way we can stay concentrated and get through the quarter and then have some time off as a reward at the end of it. I like that every single quarter has the end of the quarter followed by time off.
The updated calendar will be out for public review for one month before the school board members will vote to finalize the 2021 school calendar. The 2019-2020 school calendar will remain a traditional calendar for the coming school year.
