Students get extra day of leisure

By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

Indian River students will get a couple extra days off next school year, to help teachers reach professional development requirements set by the state. But they won’t lose any “instruction” time, according to Nina Lou Bunting, the school board member who presented next year’s calendar to the school board at their April meeting.

“The students will be receiving the same amount of instructional time but maybe not hours-time,” Bunting said.

According to state mandates, teachers are required to receive 90 hours of professional development courses every five years. Many of those classes are taught by consultants in district schools, according to officials, but the district must hire substitutes for the days that the teachers are out for professional development.

And hiring substitutes can be an expensive venture. Depending on the substitute’s amount of education, they can get paid anywhere from about $70 to $100 per day.

Bunting and the calendar committee had met and marked Oct. 13 as a full-day in-service day and Oct. 27 as a half-day in-service day to help teachers meet professional development requirements. Teachers will be in school both days but students will not. Both are days on which the students perennially have attended school. Dec. 22 was marked as the first day of Christmas break next school year, as well, and the committee bumped the last day of school up from June 9 to June 8.

“Students aren’t missing out on anything,” Bunting said. “It will be made up in other ways. If we had children in school (those days), we would have had to hire subs. This is a win-win situation.”

Indian River can afford to make such changes because of the amount of time its students spent in school in past years.

At a March school board meeting, Gary Brittingham told the board that the district could have canceled 26 days of school last year and still met the requirement for student hours. According to Brittingham, students are required by the state to be in school for 180 days. But a school day for a student only equates to 5.88 hours he said and high school seniors have less stringent requirements.

By his calculations, Brittingham told the board that Indian River students spent at least 152 more hours in school than what is required by the state.

Brittingham urged the board in March to “use the flexibility” provided by the 26 extra days students currently spend in class. “We could take advantage of the law,” he said.

Board members expressed concern at both meetings that hours of instruction — which they said have helped produce one of the best-scoring districts in the state — would be reduced.

The new calendar passed by a vote of 7-1 at the April meeting.