Last night the board voted to shorten the school year by 3 days to 177 instructional days. Teacher contracts will be based on 185 days. When we originally discussed reducing days it was to give us room to be able to react to lost state revenue. Unfortunately our local property tax revenue dropped by 5% instead of the 2.5% we projected. This ate up the three days proposed and left us no ability to adjust to changes from the state in 2011. Dr Harper’s original proposal was to only shorten the school year by 3 days and re-evaluate where we are in January. I made the proposal to go ahead and take the 5 days now for the following reasons:
- This is over and teachers will not have the uncertainty about this issue for the 2010-2011 school year
- We will take no more days this year…THIS IS IT!
- Your pay will be STABLE
- By taking 5 days now we can divide the lost pay by 12 months instead of 6…Lowest monthly impact to teachers
- Teachers start back on August 4th instead of on July 30th
- Students come back on August 9th instead of August 4th (full week of instruction)
- Teachers will only have one post-planning day (May 23rd, 2011)
No one likes to lose any money but by taking this action now we have tried to create a situation where we have the least impact on our staff. Had we taken only 3 days most of us believed that we would have had to come back and take more days second semester. We are giving you all of this information now so that you can budget and plan for next year without waiting for some other shoe to drop. I hope that the extra time at the beginning and end of this years calendar will help ease the blow of the lost salary. The good news is that this is DONE….You know everything that we know and now you can just focus on your family and teaching your students.
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