Tim Hensley, communications officer for the Hamilton County Schools district, ran into a buzz-saw Thursday when he presented the Hamilton County Board of Education a two-year school calendar that already had the imprimatur of a carefully selected community committee.
If he thought there would be a few polite questions about the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 schedules and then tacit approval before the board voted on them next week, he was wrong. Indeed, there was more heated discussion about the calendars than there was about the state's Partnership Network agreement that Tennessee Commissioner of Education Dr. Candice McQueen laid out at the board's work session.
Board members Rhonda Thurman and Karitsa Mosley Jones and, in absentia, Kathy Lennon and Tiffanie Robinson, were not happy about what they saw. Too many stops and starts before Christmas. No Presidents Day holiday. Worry over an inability for parents to get child care. Too few professional development days.
"This," said Thurman, "is a nightmare."
Hensley, though, said Friday he was "not surprised" at the reaction, that there had been widely divergent views on the calendar committee, and that it was all part of the nuts and bolts of putting together a calendar.
Although "volunteers [on the committee] want to feel their work was appreciated," he said, "they understood going into the process" that they were just one step along the way.
The committee, according to Hensley, wanted to eliminate, where possible, two-day instructional weeks because members believed little learning occurred in those weeks. That resulted in the calendars giving students a week off for fall break in mid-October, another week at Thanksgiving and then two weeks at Christmas.
On the two days before the traditional three-day Thanksgiving break, he said, absenteeism doubled. That's why the calendar committee wanted to tackle the problem.
It also wanted to build in an annual consistency of holiday breaks and a consistency with the beginning of the school year.
Now, Hensley said, the board will take the committee offerings, administrative staff recommendations, community survey results generated over the next few days, their own philosophies and last fall's original draft calendar to determine what the actual schedules will be.
"People don't realize how the [public school] calendar impacts the whole community," he said.
Once the calendars are set, we hope the community will be just as interested in what's happening during those 180 instructional days as it is in which days they occur.