May 21, 2012

New law will boot most breaks for students

By SCOTT WRIGHT

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CENTRE — With the possible exception of the legislators who passed it last week, it's hard to find folks who think Alabama's new law mandating start and end dates for the 2012-13 school year was properly thought through.

“Before the law passed, our first day of school would have been Aug. 8 and the last day would have been May 30, 2013,” Cherokee County School Superintendent Brian Johnson told The Post last week. “With the new Flexible School Calendar Act, the first day will be Aug. 20 and the last day will be May 24, 2013.”

Statewide, the overwhelming reaction to the new law has been that it is “flexible” in name only. Newspapers in Huntsville last week reported that parents there are discussing a boycott of Alabama beaches next summer in a show of protest.

Gov. Robert Bentley didn't like the law, either. He vetoed it. But the Legislature overrode the veto, putting the law into effect immediately.

Proponents of the law claim it will bring more than $22 million in additional tax revenue for Alabama's 132 school districts. Earlier this month the state's Legislative Fiscal Office disagreed with that prediction.

Johnson said the new state-mandated school year basically has two bookends—and very little leeway.

“When we say 'leeway', local school systems have always been able to make scheduling decisions, as long as there were 180 student days and 187 teacher days,” he said. “We could make that work.”

Now, Johnson figures on wholesale changes to the 2012-13 calendar.

“We had a fall break, but that's probably going to come out,” Johnson said. “And we were taking off the entire week for Thanksgiving, just to give students a break. But that's probably going to go back to a two-day or three-day break.”

The Christmas holiday and the second half of the schedule will likely see changes, as well.

“In the spring we had a few weather days worked into the schedule, but those are probably going away,” Johnson said “With the new beginning date and ending date we may have to go on Saturday if we have a day to make up because of weather.”

After participating in a statewide webinar with officials from the state Department of Education on Thursday, Johnson said limitations in the way the law is written don't allow for very many creative solutions, such as a four-day school week.

“They put in the law, '180 days or 1,080 equivalent hours'. So they allow us to adjust the days,” he said. “But the Alabama Department of Education has suggested staying on a 180-day calendar because of several factors.”

Among those factors, Johnson said, are restrictions on overtime pay for hourly support-staff employees.

“If we extend a day beyond eight hours, employees will be working more and they have to be paid more,” Johnson said.

Yet another problem with the law is that teachers are contracted for 187 days and the law says that cannot change.

“If we reduced student days from 180 to, say, 175, we'd have 12 teacher days without students, as opposed to the current seven teacher days,” Johnson said. “That wouldn't be good.”

Johnson said the new law listed only two required holidays—Veteran's Day and Memorial Day.

“President's Day is not listed, and we always tried to observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day,” Johnson said. “We'll do everything we can to keep MLK Day on the school calendar.”

Throw on top of everything else the need to adjust salary schedules, student handbooks and policy manuals, and it seems obvious state legislators did little conferring with education officials before passing the law, then overriding the governor's veto.

“The broad, overall view is that it may have seemed like a good idea to extend the summer vacation time and increase revenue,” Johnson said. “But when you box it in, it's just difficult to make it work. Students are going to get tired. Having the breaks kept them fresh and that was conducive to learning.”

Ultimately, however, Johnson said he plans to keep a positive attitude about the change because, after all, it is state law now.

“Who's to say test scores and revenue collections won't go up?” he said. “Maybe they will. They will just have to go back and look at the data at the end of the year and see how it works out. We're still going to have school and instruction going on, so our attitude is going to be, 'let's all do the best we can'.”